Jul 1
Statist logic
Sir – In light of threats of violence from angry wine-makers (report, June 22), Nicolas Sarkozy’s attitude is doing nothing to help protect vineyards and jobs in the south of France.The collapse of wine prices in France is a direct result of British supermarkets’ policies to sell cut-price wine. They are so bent on what they call hitting magical price points that the quality of the product suffers. With a 3 bottle of wine, once you remove 1.34 for duty, 45p for VAT, 36p for bottling, packaging, shipping and handling and remove an average profit of 20 per cent for the retailer, the winemaker is left with just 34p to make the wine. At 34p, the wine-maker can’t make a quality natural product.
How can you compare a wine made from grapes grown with chemical pesticides, mechanically harvested and then shipped to Europe in chemically stabilised 20,000-litre containers for bottling in Italy and Scotland, with a hand-harvested naturally fermented wine that is bottled at source?
The illusion that you can purchase “real wine” at 3 a bottle is the main cause of the troubles in French vineyards.
Steve Bennett, Redditch, Worcestershire
This bit of idiocy comes from Saturday’s letter page in the DT. I wonder if the person who is writing it realises how daft his letter reads.
Surely a way to help wine produceres is to cut the duty. Its not the fault of the supermarkets for living up to customers expectations. Its the fault of government for its over-taxation of wine.
