Twenty Thousand Litres of Bottled Wine Come Off the Market in Gouveia Because the Labels Do Not Say Where It Came From

Inspectors from the Autoridade de Segurança Alimentar e Económica (Food Safety and Economic Authority, ASAE) seized 20,226 litres of bottled wine from a producer-warehouser in the council of Gouveia this week, in the Guarda district, because the labels did not say where the wine came from. The red, white and rosé was bottled and ready to go into consumption. A contraordenação process, the Portuguese administrative offence procedure, has been opened against the operator.

The authority published the operation, named Rótulo Seguro (Safe Label), on Saturday. It was run by ASAE's Unidade Regional do Centro (Centre Regional Unit) with its Brigada Especializada dos Vinhos e Produtos Vitivinícolas (Specialised Brigade for Wines and Vitivinicultural Products).

The missing line on the label is not optional

Wine labelling in the European Union is governed by Regulation (EU) No 1308/2013. Article 119(1) lists the compulsory particulars for wine sold in the Union or for export: the category of the grapevine product, the terms and name of any protected designation of origin or geographical indication, the actual alcoholic strength, an indication of provenance, an indication of the bottler, an indication of the importer for imported wines, and the sugar content for sparkling wine.

Provenance is point (d) on that list. A bottle that does not carry it is not lawfully sellable, whatever else the label says. ASAE's own reading is that failure to meet these requirements "compromises the integrity of the commercial circuit, generates competitive imbalances and represents a risk to the safeguarding and safety of the consumer".

The second haul from the same brigade in two months

This is not an isolated inspection. On 10 July the same Centre unit, with the same wine brigade, ran an operation called Vino Seguro across the councils of Viseu, Trancoso and Oliveira do Bairro. That one took roughly 20,923 litres of bottled red, white and quality sparkling wine off the market, together with 69,550 boxes, for breaches covering provenance and other compulsory particulars and for operating without a licence. Two contraordenação processes followed.

Put the two together and the brigade has removed about 41,000 litres of bottled wine from the market in two months, all of it in the centre of the country. Gouveia sits inside the Dão demarcated region, in its Serra da Estrela sub-region, and Viseu is Dão country too. This is the oldest demarcated table-wine region in Portugal, and origin is precisely the thing its producers sell.

A sector under pressure anyway

The enforcement lands on an industry that has had a difficult year. Growers in the Douro are being paid 50 cents a kilo to leave grapes on the vine after a bumper harvest landed on the region's worst crisis in decades, and producers faced a late-summer deadline to declare their stocks. ASAE says it will keep reinforcing inspection in a sector it calls one of the most relevant in the national economy.

The pattern of recent months is consistent. ASAE shut an unlicensed food operation in Braga and pulled 76 tonnes of animal products from sale in August, and mislabelling has been a running theme, from olive oils flagged abroad as wrongly sold as extra virgin to the EU-wide push that asked shoppers to report misleading labels.

What this means for you

• Read the back label, not the front. Provenance, bottler and alcoholic strength are legally required. A bottle that names a grape and a pretty estate but never says where the wine was made is missing something the law requires.
• A seizure is not a recall. These 20,226 litres were stopped before reaching consumers. The offence is one of information and fair competition, not a health risk to wine already in your kitchen.
• If you sell or import wine, this is your risk too. The obligations bite on the bottler and on whoever puts the product on the market, and the contraordenação attaches to the economic operator, not to the vineyard.
• Complaints have a route. ASAE takes reports through its electronic complaints channel, and the Livro de Reclamações (Complaints Book) exists in electronic form for every establishment.

ASAE has not named the Gouveia operator, which is standard while a contraordenação process is open, and has not said what fine it will seek. With the harvest now being pressed across the Dão and the Beiras, the brigade that has run two of these operations this summer is unlikely to have finished.

Feature image: Solar do Vinho do Dão, Viseu. Photograph by Hipersyl, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.