Responsible drinking

Neil Pendock reflects on the challenges increasing alcohol levels bring to wine producers. 
 
For the minute, the UK remains incredibly important to SA winemakers as the supermarkets of Southwark and Sunderland account for 28% of SA exports, down sharply from 32% last year. This precipitous decrease comes as a shock as the Daily Mail reported last month that Dwayne, your average Brit in the bar, drinks an incredible 220 bottles of wine (or alcohol equivalent) a year while his partner, Sharon in the snug, knocks back an abstemious 470 pints of beer (or equivalent).

The Brits are placed an unlucky 13th in the league table of global heavy drinkers (behind an uproarious shebeen full of Eastern Europeans) and the British government is planning far reaching initiatives to call closing time on a perceived epidemic of binge drinking.

SA wine, being the second cheapest category (behind Germany) in the UK, but with far higher average alcohol levels, is in an unfortunate place and risks serious collateral damage. Now that the battle to stub out the last cigarette in Chelsea is all but won, the target for super nannies and health Nazis is the demon alcohol.

Step one is to demonize drink and government advisers now claim that alcohol is more dangerous than heroin and crack cocaine. The aptly named Professor David Nutt (chairman of Britain’s Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs) raised a few eyebrows in November when he claimed that alcohol is worse than heroin and crack cocaine and is in fact three times worse than cancer sticks and plain old top-of-the-toilet-cistern cocaine.

Last month the Guardian claimed alcohol will kill an extra 250 000 people over the next two decades and with higher alcohol levels the New World norm, SA will once again come in for special attention. Low prices, high alcohol and a carbon footprint 10 000 km long, are shaping up as an unholy trinity for hard pressed SA producers.

Proposed legislation to prohibit supermarkets from selling alcohol at a loss will affect SA in particular as SA features widely in three for £10 and BOGOF deals. Given the recent strength of the Rand, there must have been more than one producer selling wine in the UK below cost.

Plans to restrict volumes offered on BOGOFs and the size and period of discounts will ratchet up the pain even further, while the decision by government to increase the cost of drink at 2% above inflation will hit SA producers hard as the tax component of cost is relatively larger for SA than for higher priced producers like New Zealand and Portugal. A few pence extra duty on Porterville Pinotage is far more noticeable than on pricey Pétrus.

There is already a campaign to ban alcohol advertising underway and SA wine is in its sights. Globally, wine alcohol levels are up 20% in two decades as producers embrace richer, riper styles made from grapes harvested with more sugar which ferments out to higher alcohol levels. 12.5% was the magic number in Stellenbosch for the great reds of the eighties while 15% is more likely today.

A UK consumer pressure group, wineoption.org, makes a valid point when it notes: “in spite of all the aggressive marketing of lighter and healthier food options, the wine trade does next to nothing to help consumers discover lighter and healthier wine counterparts.” In SA, we’re yet to reach the aggressive marketing stage, although brandhouse are sponsoring a new initiative called the Responsible Drinking Media Awards.

The aim is to “recognise and celebrate journalistic efforts in supporting, promoting and contributing to the Responsible Drinking agenda and ultimately, changing consumer behaviour.” There are several categories for print, TV, electronic and social media with first prizes of R10 000. But while recruiting notoriously hard drinking reporter bar flies to communicate the message is a good place to start, a more effective strategy may be to target the pocket, by preferentially taxing wine according to alcohol levels.

In last month’s national budget, tax was raised by 13.5 cents a bottle. Which is a deal for the 16.3% alcohol Christine Marie 2006 Shiraz from Niel Joubert but unfair to the dead abstemious Paul Cluver 9% Close Encounter Riesling 2010.

Tax certainly did for smokes and no matter how eloquently hedonism’s hacks put forward the case for moderation, as Just-Drinks columnist Chris Losh cynically notes “Banging on about the need for lower alcohol wines isn’t, I don’t think, going to be taken seriously by anybody. Not least because I don’t see any groundswell of opinion in favour of it at consumer level, let alone from within the trade.” Tax will promote a trend to teetotalism.