Wine and spirit producers can breathe a sigh of relief as they won’t have to start amending their labels to include calories per glass and all the nutritional guff any time soon
On Tuesday EU ministers agreed rules that will require the nutritional content of food to be shown on packaging including energy content, fat, saturates, carbohydrates, protein, sugars and salt. But alcohol has managed to escape the measures.
Copa Cogeca, the body representing European farmers and cooperatives praised the ruling. Secretary-General Pekka Pesonen, said: “I welcome the fact that Ministers agreed to exempt certain alcoholic beverages (such as wines, products derived from aromatized wines, mead, beer, spirits, but not alcopops) from nutrition labelling rules as well as from the indication of the list of ingredients”.
However Pesonen also called for the European Commission to re-examine this exemption within five years of the ruling coming into force…
A colour-coding system for labels on food and drink products, known as “traffic light” labels has also been rejected for the time being.
In addition, it’s interesting to note that a time when country of origin seems to be less important to wine drinkers, EU Ministers voted in favour of country of origin labelling on meat. So, we want to know where our pork comes from but not our Pinot?
