Dear Wine Lover,
You may remember that Rishi Sunak announced a change to how wine duty is calculated, making it a function of alcoholic strength. This sounds reasonable superficially but the delivery of the new system is ridiculously complex. The number of different duty bands is set to rise from two or three to more than 30, creating an absolute nightmare for the wine trade, increasing prices of most wines and, as reported by Sam below, encouraging the creation of deliberately, and generally industrially, reduced-alcohol brands.
The new tax system is highly unlikely to result in greater Treasury receipts and it will leave Brits paying the highest wine taxes in Europe. Half of the purchase price of a £9 bottle of wine at 13.5% alcohol, for instance, will go straight to the UK government, leaving little for the wine itself once everything else has been paid for.
A group of interested parties is mounting a campaign to return to a simpler system. You can help by signing a petition that goes live early next week (I’ll include the link in next week’s newsletter). If you’re resident in the UK, you could consider writing to your Member of Parliament to protest at the new system. In the meantime, you might like to join me in sending a token of protest to Rachel Reeves, c/o HM Treasury, 1 Horse Guards Road, London SW1A 2HQ, in the form of the capsule or a squashed screwcap from the next bottle of wine you drink and include a message urging her to #CapTheWineTax as well as your name and address.
Above is a picture taken at the end of the 2024 harvest at Croft’s Quinta da Roêda in the Douro, courtesy of The Fladgate Partnership. Julia supplied a tasting article this week on current ports, 17 2022 vintage ports and many more. She also reported in detail on the 2024 growing season in Portugal.
This was a useful companion piece to Ferran’s report on the 2024 growing season in Spain. A great infographic shows us just how important in volume terms Castilla-La Mancha and that relatively obscure wine region Extremadura are. He also provided some quite arresting stats on the macro wine situation in Spain, where the total vineyard area has shrunk by about a third in the last 25 years but the country is actually producing more wine. This is because so many old, less productive vines have been ripped out. I do hope this does not continue and that the Spaniards realise what a unique resource old vines can be.
Those of us who care about old vines got a boost last week when the International Organisation of Vine and Wine acknowledged the role our Old Vine Registry has played in helping them come up with a definition of an old vine. This development, which may eventually inform EU law and research, formed part of Sam’s Wine news in five this week. There were also reports on prospects for wine under Trump, more flood effects in Spain, and the increase in wines deliberately engineered, by reducing their alcoholic strength, to attract a lower UK duty rate.
Our Italy editor Walter Speller reported on his early look at 2021 Barolos and 2022 Barbarescos with some fascinating musings on the virtues, or not, of cask samples and on changes in bottling dates and vintage presentations. Both combinations of vintage and denomination were looking good, with the high expectations of 2021 Barolo generally met.
