Spot checks on wine standards at licensed premises in
Weston-super-Mare have been carried out this month.
Officers from our Trading Standards Service, in conjunction
with an inspector from the Food Standards Agency’s Wine Standards
Branch, visited a range of licensed premises in the town to
establish whether wines sold “by the glass” matched relevant menu
descriptions.
In every case wines purchased during the survey, which included
Shiraz, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, were found to be correctly
described, both in terms of their country of origin and grape
variety.
As well as the inspections at licensed venues, retail-level
sampling was undertaken to establish whether Eastern European wines
sold locally complied with legal rules relating to labelling and
composition. During this survey wines from Bulgaria, Romania,
Hungary and the Ukraine were sent for chemical analysis.
Whilst all of the bottles tested were found to contain
acceptably low levels of the preservative sulphur dioxide, two
wines were found to have alcoholic strengths outside the permitted
tolerance in relation to the abv (alcohol by volume) marked on the
label.
One Bulgarian red wine marked as 13% abv had a strength of just
12.3%, whilst a bottle of rose from the same country marked as 12%
abv had a strength of 12.8% (the legal tolerance is just 0.5%).
Additionally, a number of technical errors were discovered on
the product labels, which will be addressed and corrected in
discussion with the wines' importers.
Executive member responsible for consumer protection, Cllr Carl
Francis-Pester, said: "This sort of innovative partnership working
by the council's officers is essential to provide confidence in the
local night-time economy.
"It is certainly reassuring to know that the majority of wines
available locally, and in fact all of those spot-checked by
officers in local bars, are up to the mark in terms of their
composition and the descriptions applied to them."