Since 2003, tobacco packages have had a health notice on the back. The first slogans were lukewarm, almost polite, just a goad for users to remember the obvious: “Smoking is harmful to health.” Then the warnings grew in intensity and size, starkly showing the effects of tobacco on the human body. In 2010, the Spanish government decided to heed the recommendations of the European Commission and incorporate photographs of decrepit and festering lungs into cigarette packs with increasingly lurid warnings: “Smoking can cause a slow and painful death”, “Smoking causes impotence” , “Smoking kills”.
Winemakers now fear that alcoholic beverages, regardless of degree, will follow a similar path. In his nightmares, the silhouette of a bottle appears on the back of which not only is the label of the Denomination of Origin and some kind phrases about farms and varieties, but also a health warning that predicts painful tragedies to those who intend to have a drink .
And they believe that the first steps are already being taken. The European Parliament decided to form a Special Committee to Defeat Cancer (BECA) in June 2020, which has just approved its final report. It is an extensive document, which includes 196 articles and in which many issues are addressed, from the convenience of promoting a healthy diet to the need for member states to increase preventive medical tests.
Among so many recommendations, two have been cast (points 15 and 16) that have triggered the alarms of the Spanish Wine Federation (FEV). They stress that alcohol “is a risk factor” for many types of cancer and point out that “when it comes to cancer prevention there is no safe level of alcohol consumption.” For this reason, it requires the European Commission to adopt several measures that allow it to reduce its consumption little by little. The report literally asks to “include health warnings in the labeling” and “consider an increase in taxes on alcoholic beverages.” At no point are distinctions based on grade introduced, so that the Committee’s recommendations apply equally to vodka, whisky, gin, wine or beer.
For José Luis Benítez, general director of the FEV, the document, although it does not have legal force, may be the seed of initiatives that cause “serious reputational damage to wine, which, on the other hand, is one of the most exported products of the European Union”. The FEV, which brings together more than 700 winemakers and marketers from all over Spain, is especially concerned that the report emphasizes that “there is no safe level of consumption”, that is, that it is implied that drinking a single glass of red or white in food one is already assuming the risk of contracting cancer.
intense debate
Although a consensus text was finally achieved by the majority of the committee members, the point referring to alcohol was one of the ones that aroused the most debate. The main rapporteur, the French oncologist Véronique Trillet-Lenoir, from the liberal group, had initially presented a much harsher text, calling for the health warnings on the label to occupy a “prominent” space. That forceful adjective was finally eliminated with the amendments, which softened the original document somewhat.
German MEP Peter Liese, from the European People’s Party, acknowledged that there had been “many different opinions” on the matter and congratulated himself for having reached a “very balanced” position: “We do not want photos to appear on bottles of alcohol like on the tobacco packets. Perhaps something similar to cigarettes can be done, but with a softer labeling.
Spanish MEP Dolors Montserrat (PP), who abstained in the final vote, warns that there is still time to introduce changes that can ‘save’ wine and other lower-grade beverages, such as beer or cider. «The great success we had was to introduce the mention of the Mediterranean diet in the document. It cost us a lot, but I think it was very important because everyone knows what it includes, even if it is not expressly mentioned, “he says. Two Italian MEPs from the League, Stefania Zambelli and Angelo Ciocca, also militated in the oenological cause, unsuccessfully demanding a specific exception for wine: “We cannot put wine in the same bag as other alcoholic beverages because, consumed moderately, it is even advisable”, claimed Zambelli.
The socialist Nicolás González Casares, also a member of the committee, considers that “the sector’s concern is excessive” and encourages a more subtle reading of the document: “What has been attempted has been precisely to avoid any mention of wine so that it does not linked him with cancer. Instead, the report itself makes it very clear that the impact is greater the more alcohol is consumed and that the healthiest diet is the Mediterranean. González Casares, who voted in favor of the text, points out that not even the request to introduce health notices should be considered with fear, since the committee itself raises the possibility of doing it digitally, perhaps through a QR code, without having an intimidating physical presence in the bottles. The third Spanish MEP on the committee, Margarita de la Pisa (Vox), abstained in the final vote.
just rodriguez
wine and health
Whether drinking a little wine kills or feeds is an old, confusing and far from innocent battle that has been going on for many years. Defenders and detractors of Bacchus continually launch scientific studies at the head to defend their theses. The report of the BECA committee is based on a statistical study published in 2018 in the journal ‘The Lancet’ and assumed by the World Health Organization, whose conclusions read: «The optimal level of alcohol consumption is none. This contradicts many health guidelines, which speak of health benefits if you drink at most two drinks a day.
The Spanish Wine Federation counterattacks with other studies, which tend to insist that moderate consumption can have a beneficial effect on cardiovascular health. In addition, it questions the article published in ‘The Lancet’ because, among other things, “cancer is a multifactorial disease” and concepts such as the lifestyle of citizens or their consumption patterns cannot be dispensed with when measuring the alcohol impact.
“We must not lose sight of the fact that this was a public health project, exclusively related to cancer prevention, which does not want to harm the production sector,” said MEP González Casares. However, his Italian colleague Angelo Ciocca regrets the decision to “penalize the consumption of a good glass of wine, which is part of the Mediterranean diet and that many cardiologists recommend.”
This oenophile position does not seem to have the support of the Director General of Public Health of the European Commission, John F. Ryan, who closed the debate by recalling the commitment to reduce alcohol consumption in the EU by 10% by 2025. Without distinctions or nuances.
The plenary session of the European Parliament will vote on the BECA group’s report in February. Dolors Montserrat warns that the battle is not yet lost, since the plenary can admit new amendments that modify the final text: «We are working to include the word ‘harmful’ or ‘harmful’ when talking about alcohol consumption. We want the majority of MEPs to realize that Spain, France or Italy, the great wine-producing countries, are also those in which there is more responsible consumption. Montserrat acknowledges, however, that it will not be an easy task. It never is in Europe, that sometimes devilish hive of cultures, interests, traditions and ideologies.
The document that comes out of the plenary session will become a parliamentary resolution without executive force, although the European Commission seems willing to demand that from now on the policies for the promotion of agricultural products be aligned with the European Plan against Cancer.
For Spanish winemakers, all this regulatory drizzle could end up leaving wine in a situation of inferiority at a particularly difficult time, when exports were beginning to recover their pulse after the Brexit disaster and the stoppage of the pandemic. Bad time to impose new taxes on wine or to point out, even on an electronic label, that drinking a little glass causes cancer.
In figures
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13%
of the vineyards in the world are in Spain. They occupy a total of 941,086 hectares throughout the national geography -
4,300
there are wineries in Spain, 3,075 exporters. They invoice 5,300 million euros per year. -
70
are the appellations of origin in Spain and 42 protected geographical areas -
+18
This is what the volume of exports has grown in the first ten months of 2021, while its value registered an increase of 10%. -
2020
A complicated year: Spanish wine exports fell in 2020 by 6% in volume and 3.6% in value compared to the data for the previous year | The seconds: Spain was in 2020 the second exporter in the world in volume (2,012 million liters), but the third in value (2,616 million).
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