THE WINE MERCHANT. An independent magazine for independent retailers
Issue 142, January 2025
Dog of the month: Freddie Vinomondo. Conwy
Importers will avoid wine duty by fair means or foul Producers will have an incentive to under-declare alcoholic strength – and WSTA says rounding-down can be legal
W
ith just days to go before the UK’s reviled new wine duty
system comes into force, there
are warnings that the rules are wide open to abuse and fraud.
The framework gives producers a
financial incentive to declare a lower
alcohol content than is actually the case.
The government also stands to lose out on duty payments thanks to a loophole that
labels at 13% which means, effectively, the
Lambert has been talking to officials
government’s getting defrauded.”
at HMRC and Defra about the issue to
in other words, the only document that
arguments have fallen on deaf ears.
He adds: “The lab analysis is not one of
the acceptable forms of declaring abv. So you should be sure is declaring the right
amount is the only one they haven’t put in the policy. It’s quite incredible.”
try to raise awareness of the flaws in
the government’s policy. But he says his
“From February, the whole alcohol excise
system is open to abuse and fraud at quite a major level,” he says. “They’re very
seems to allow declarants to round-down the abv of wines to the nearest 0.5%.
Daniel Lambert of Daniel Lambert Wines,
a leading supplier to the independent
trade, points out that HMRC will be basing its duty calculations on the alcoholic
strength of a wine as it’s stated on invoices and labels.
“Labels and invoices are not technical
documents,” he says. “You can write pretty much anything you like. Less scrupulous
producers, of which there are many in the
world, or ones who don’t actually care, will do just that.
“As we all know, alcohol labelling has
certain tolerances the world over. And
more often than not, labels are printed one or two years in advance. If you’re a small
producer in, say, Gevrey-Chambertin, three years ago your label – your wine – was
at 13%. Global warming has put it up to
14.5% – but you don’t care, because you’ve printed your label and nobody’s going to
check it. So you just keep going with your
Jessica Summer started her Mouse & Grape business back in 2020, knowing she wanted to focus on cheese and wine but without a clear idea of how her idea would take shape. In November, she took a giant leap by opening a shop in north London. Story on page 4.