Strength and weakness

Saturday 26 May 2012

I wrote about E&J Gallo's plans to seduce us with their lusciously sweet moscato recently.

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Tom Bruce-Gardyne

The giant US corporation reckons there could be as many as three million white wine drinkers in the UK whose needs are not being met. Earlier this year, the company's European MD, Bill Roberts, announced plans to invest more money in moscato than in any previous launch in Britain.

Having now tried a bottle I can tell you it's not really my cup of tea, and from a quick straw poll in the office others feel the same. "Tastes like a flat Lambrini" was one of the more printable comments. But I am certain Gallo has done its research and discovered a market gagging for something sweet, particularly among the new generation of drinkers. If you have been weaned on alcopops you need something to help you on the journey to the grown-up land of whisky, beer and dry wine.Where Gallo may have miscalculated is on the strength of its new wine. At 8.8% it is taxed at the full £1.90 a bottle, the same rate as any wine from 5.5% to 15%. Below the lower threshold HM Revenue receives just 80p per bottle, and it is perhaps there where moscato could sweep through the United Kingdom as it has swept through the United States. Lighter styles have long been made in northern Italy by simply stopping the fermentation halfway. You can do this with any wine, but it seems to work best with the fresh, grapey flavours of moscato.A chardonnay made this way would be sickly sweet and undrinkable, so the other option is to ferment the wine out fully and then reduce the strength. The technology for doing this has improved greatly, though in my view not enough to allow you to slash the alcohol to this degree and get away with it. As soaring duty rates push up the price of wine, though, all the big supermarkets have been looking at this category because fairly soon the only bottles below a fiver will be at or below 5.5%."People fall into two distinct camps," says Arabella Woodrow, master of wine and head of wine buying at Morrisons. "At a tasting, if you say the alcohol level is low, some people say 'good' and some people say 'boo'." As for moscato being the next big thing, Woodrow sounds sceptical and points out that we still have Lambrusco as a low-strength alternative (though I cannot see the frothy Italian from the 1970s making a comeback)."It would be really good to have a tax break between 5.5% and, say, 10.5%," Woodrow adds. "It would change the way a lot of wine is made because that's much more doable than this all-or-nothing approach." And she is correct in saying the half-strength sector is often dismissed as diet wine or punishment wine and has a very low fan base as a result.With the governments in Edinburgh and London so concerned about our livers, it sounds a no-brainer. Give people the incentive to trade down by even one degree and you would strip out millions of units of alcohol. The Treasury mutter something about being prevented by EU rules but I don't believe a word of it. The truth is they are terrified of losing a shed-load of tax. n

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Strength and weakness

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