Wines and spirits labelling post-Brexit By David Richardson, Regulatory & Commercial Affairs Director, WSTA
New and changing labelling rules following the Brexit transition can be difficult to navigate for wine and spirits businesses based in the UK. “That must be good – it’s 15%!” exclaimed a customer in the wine aisle of my local supermarket. I guess it is obvious which bit of the packaging mattered most to them. For marketing departments, packaging is so much more than that. Producers need to project an image of their product through its label and supporting promotional material. At the same time, their compliance team must act as goalkeepers to make sure that mandatory and voluntary particulars are correct for each of the markets where the product will be sold. As one business explained to me, there is a “good” label – that has all the information that the marketing department wants, as long as it isn’t misleading – and
a “bad” label – that has all the information that must be there and in the correct format. Added to that, there are rules about font size and the placement of certain items of information in the same field of vision, as well as sectorspecific rules for wines compared to spirits. EU rules post-Brexit Now that the Brexit transition period has ended, relatively little has so far changed. Whilst that
may appear to be good news, some things have changed and further changes coming down the track need to be considered now, as products are made, bottled and labelled in advance of release dates. If the label on products placed on the UK market before 30 September 2022 and sold to exhaustion after that complies with EU rules, then it is acceptable for the UK market.
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