Scotland's "government" (it's really just a big regional council that some call a parliament, others call it the shortbread senate) recently won a legal action that the Scottish Whisky Association had initiated to stop it from introducing minimum unit pricing (MUP) on alcohol.
This has now come into force so that it is illegal to sell alcohol at a price point of less than 50 pence per unit.
If you consider that an average wine at around 12-14% alcohol by volume (ABV) contains about 10-12 units, therefore the minimum that it can be sold for is about £5 per bottle.
The measure was designed to deal with problem boozers who zombified themselves drinking super strength "cider" available in handy 3 litre plastic bottles at just over a pound a litre - this will now cost more than a tenner. If the problem was super strength cider, then the solution was to ban it, not implement a policy that is full of inconsistencies.
As the Scottish "government" helpfully points out on its website, there's nothing to stop you from purchasing your favourite tipple mail order.
Righty-ho, running low on summer wines, I ordered a couple of cases from Aldi who have some delightful wines in their line-up, including a zingy and refreshing South African Sauvignon Blanc and a deeply satisfying Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon, which latter wine was one of the stars of a wine tasting that I held back in January.
3 days after ordering, I received an email telling me that I wouldn't be receiving all of the wines that I had ordered as some of them fell foul of the Scottish MUP legislation.
True, the Cabernet Sauvignon is only £4.79 and the Sauvignon Blanc is a juicy £3.95 but, last time I looked, Aldi's online wine retail operation is based well south of Hadrian's wall.
On this basis, I wrote to the chief executive pointing out that perhaps their legal eagles had misinterpreted the legislation.
Ah, no, back came the mealy mouthed response - "we don't want people to be able to purchase something cheaper online than the price that they would have to pay should they purchase in-store in Scotland".
Somewhat stupidly, MUP isn't a tax therefore when someone purchases a £3.95 bottle of wine in a Scottish Aldi branch for a fiver, Aldi gets to trouser the difference...........
Aha, the penny drops - this has everything to do with a wee bit of extra windfall profit.
Well, the point is that I'm not going to drag myself halfway across Edinburgh through the car-hating Council's vehicle-intolerance zone just to find that the Aldi branch doesn't have any of the wine that I want in stock. Once I find a wine that I enjoy, I will restock it in multiples of 6 or 12 - easy to do online but not in-branch.
If they really want to persist with this cheapskatery, then the least that Aldi can do is fix their website so that before I purchase, I need to enter my postcode so that the content is automatically filtered, rather than me having to calculate the MUP for each bottle to work out whether or not I can buy it.
Sort yourselves out or I might as well go back to my favourite local merchant, Great Grog.
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