Talking federal rules, by law, you can bring back one liter per person duty free -- more under rules specific to a particular location such as VI, Puerto Rico, etc. - as most know, you can bring back more than one liter per person and the agents are very unlikely to make you pay duty if you have few bottles of wine instead of one. Most states restrict you to one gallon (and theoretically state law is enforced by feds) to bring in -- but one gallon per person is more than most people would be bringing in - one gallon is almost exactly five bottles of wine of 750ml size. If you have more than one gallon of alcohol per person you might cause a customs agent to take interest in you, but I have known people off cruise ships to be bringing in a case of wine without being asked to pay any duty - luck of draw on that. Main thing, as said before, is to declare what you have - don't risk getting caught with undeclared stuff just to save a few bucks duty.

I can add that we were returning from a Baltic cruise last Saturday, June 6, coming home through Dulles, and we declared a necklace that we got for about $3,000 - the agent thanked us "for being honest" - told us that he was not going to make us deal with paying any duty - which wasn't much anyway - and let us go. There probably are people on here that have brought back jewelry worth more that have not had to actually pay any duty when bringing it into the US.