Wine legislation - proposed amendments: consultation analysis

Rationale for legislating

Ice wine

Since the UK is not involved in ice wine production, domestic interests lie with imports and ensuring products placed on the UK market, and claiming to be ice wine, meet the exacting production requirements for ice wines.

REUL does not provide a definition for ice wine and as such Ministers are not able to regulate its use on wine, meaning any product using frozen grapes could argue that it is ice wine even if those grapes have been picked and subsequently frozen.

To support consumer understanding and to allow the UK to ratify the CPTPP agreement, we need to be able to enforce a definition for ice wine that requires it to be produced from grapes that are frozen naturally on the vine.

New approved oenological practices

Compliance with the OIV forms the basis of the quality standards required of wine imported into Great Britain. In order to ensure that standards in Scotland are maintained, it is important for us to update the list of approved oenological practices set out in Regulation (EU) 2019/934. This will ensure that our wine producers have access to the latest technological developments and winemaking practices. This will also protect the standard of product available to consumers.

This legislation will ensure a consistency of approach with the EU and across the UK.

Proposed legislation

To legislate on both ice wine and changes to oenological practices, we propose to make regulations amending retained Regulations (EU) 2019/33 and 2019/934 and to bring those into force in July 2024.