A glass of Chianti in hand, and troubling news for anyone who makes wine: Britain's tax and customs authority, HMRC, has uncovered a black market for wine in England worth between 350 and 700 million pounds.
The volume involved runs somewhere between 90 and 180 million liters. HMRC's own figures suggest that 11% of all the wine drunk by British consumers does not come through regular, legal channels.
That means around 20 million bottles are smuggled into the country every year. Worse still, some of that wine is not smuggled at all but produced illegally, using a "wine kit" that the European Union has already banned.
Imagine the taste of a wine made that way, cut with chemicals. It has nothing in common with real wine: grapes selected by hand, fermented the traditional way, and aged patiently in barrel. Every stage of winemaking needs its own time - that patience is exactly what makes a great wine.
True wine lovers know what it means to enjoy a glass of fine wine, and they refuse to feed a black market built on illegal, counterfeit bottles.
