There are at least 3 bands of tax on beer, one for below 2.%8 ABV, one for 2.8+ to 7.5% ABV and one for higher than 7.5% ABV.
The price you pay often has very little to do with taxation. A 2.8% beer may cost the same as a 6% beer in many pubs.
Possibly the reason for poor sales of low alcohol beer is that many have been dumbed down to remove any flavour.
What alcohol percentage?
12%
Friend's elderberry one was very nice.
Although I tried many times, the only success I had was elderberry. A long time ago, but I did think it rather nice.
In message , stuart noble writes
Are you putting it on your fish and chips or what?
While I might be missing out, I gave up buying cheap wine some years ago
- I prefer pleasant experiences to unpleasant ones
Are you sure?
ISTR that import duty for commercial means was alc% dependent
When living in Indonesia, I made 20l of tropical fruity wine in a potable water bottle
When it had finished fermenting, I capped the top off ... except it hadn't - I thought a bomb had gone off when it exploded at 4am
Isn't it great to have servants when you need them ?
Thanks for that - I'll alert SWMBO.
We have a bloke at work who is a wine buff and he spends time sampling various supermarket plonks and providing the rest of us with tasting notes. Occasionally we break organisation rules and have a Friday lunch with half a glass of one of his recommended wines. They have all been astonishingly good.
His view on Aldi wines at the moment is that there is only one worth drinking, a Rioja Reserva 2006 for £6.99. He says it is very good and I trust his judgement. He was "a bit scathing" about any of the sub £4 wines on offer saying that he's tried most of them and they have all either gone down the sink or have been used for cooking.
[big snip]
Oh yes the bit I forgot, there is no Montepulciano in Montepulciano Nobile. MN is made using Sangiovese grapes.
SWTSMBO may find this of interest:
Also see:
What utter rubbish!
MBQ
Elderberry with a few blackberries thrown in. Very nice, if I say so myself. Still have a 20yr old bottle somewhere. one day I'll find the courage to open it.
MBQ
I'd like to see how you get on in a double blind tasting of a representative sample of wines.
Possibly the worst wine I have ever tasted, during a xompany "team building" wine tasting jolly, turned out to be the most expensive. Well over =A320/bottle but I forget the exact figure.
MBQ
Roman soldiers used to drink diluted vinegar - so my partaking has a long history - even to those from Italy. :-)
You recall correctly - for most beers the rate is (according to HMRC websit= e) the duty on 1 hectolitre (for some reason the hectolitre is often used w= hen talking about drinks!) is GBP19.51 multiplied by the percentage alcohol= . (the rate increases for beer above 7.5%, and reduces for below 2.8%). Spi= rits are taxed similarly, though the rates are different. Cider, on the other hand, is taxed at a flat rate, which only depends which= alcohol band it falls into, in the same way as wine. The rate for cider up= to 7.5% is about equivalent to the rate for a beer of 2%, which presumably= explains why it's the drink of choice for a certain sector of the populati= on...
My palette just isn't refined enough for all that stuff, and I suspect I'm not the only one.
I used to drink thunderbird wine at =A31.99 a bottle, not sure I could do t= hat now ;-)
The several I recommended don't need a refined palette to appreciate the difference between them and cheap acidic plonk.
The nice thing for me is that one of the winemakers is a friend and neighbour. When I visit him he slaps a jug of his best on the table and points out I can drink it for free from the jug or pay a wine merchant EUR
70 for a bottle.
At one time all the leading UK wine "experts" used to recommend it.
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