Vintage 1992
HERE is what to say to Lord Young over breakfast — or Kenneth Clarke, if he is your host when the 1992 road show comes your way. Ask them what the single European market will do for the wine- drinking man. John Avery points out in his new list that more than half the price of a basic £2 bottle of wine now goes in duty and VAT (which, he says, makes his more expensive wines better value.) The Wine Society's list tiptoes through the labyrinth of European taxation: 'Denmark and Ire- land pay roughly double our wine duty of 77p a bottle, Belgium and Luxembourg about 18p, France 1.5p, and the others no duty at all.' As for the VAT rates, they range from 38 per cent to six per cent. The magic year 1992 is supposed to put all Europe's wine on a level sideboard and all these duties into harmony. The prospect provides a fair test of Euro attitudes. If you think that in 1992 a dam will burst and a lake of delicious wine flood into this country, complete with subsidies for drink- ing it up, you are allowing hope for the Common Agricultural Policy to triumph over experience. If you think that the whole thing will go away, you are simply mistaken — whatever a Common Market regulation may do, it does not go away. If you suspect that we shall finish up harmo- nising our duties with Denmark's, you are an intransigent cynic and Lord Young will not ask you to breakfast again. If, though, your eyes are fixed on wider horizons, if you say that quarrels over such trivialities as the duties on wine should not be allowed to distract us from the higher European ideal, then the Foreign Office has a job waiting for you and a single ticket to Brussels, where you will be taken for a mug, like your predecessors. And if cham- pagne is significantly cheaper in 1992 that it is now, I'll stand Lord Young a bottle of Bollinger — but, somehow, I do not expect it.
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