Irish consumers pay €3.19 on tax per every standard €9 bottle of wine and €6.37 on sparkling wine, research shows.
Irish excise on wine is the highest in the EU, according to the latest ‘Irish Wine Market Report’ from Drinks Ireland.
"Effectively this is a tax on celebrations," highlighted Jim Bradley, Chair of Drinks Ireland | Wine and Chairman of wine distributor Febvre Wines.
The research showed that following Ireland, Finish consumers pay €2.83 tax on a standard bottle of wine, British consumers pay €2.43, Swedish pay €1.83, and Lithuanian consumers pay €1.24.
The report highlighted that of the 28 EU Member States, 14 of them charge no duty on wine, such as Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany and the Czech Republic to name but a few.
In 2018 the sector paid €376 million to the Exchequer, with the report noting that over the past ten years wine excise has generated over €3.5 billion for the Government, Drinks Ireland said in a statement.
Second Most Popular Beverage
Wine remains Ireland’s second most popular beverage with a 27% market share in the alcohol drinks market.
The report found that in 2018 total wine consumption decreased by 2% compared to the previous year, while per capita wine consumption decreased by 3.6%, which reflects the general trend of declining alcohol consumption in Ireland.
The report compared red, white and rosé wine sales and found that red wine consumption increased by 1% between 2017 and 2018, accounting for 46% of the total.
White wine consumption decreased by 1% to 49%, while rosé consumption remained the same at 5%. Sparkling wine sales rose in 2018 with it accounting for 4.7% of total wine sales, up from 2.7% market share in 2017.
It also looked at the performance of wine by country of production. For the sixth consecutive year, Chilean wine remains the nation’s favourite, followed by Australian. Our third, fourth and fifth favourites are Spanish, French and Italian respectively.
Meanwhile, the performance of off-trade wine sales has gained further ground on the on-trade between 2017 and 2018.
© 2018 Checkout – your source for the latest Irish retail news. Article by Donna Ahern. Click subscribe to sign up for the Checkout print edition.
