award-winning winemaker facing a £30,000 bill for wrong shaped bottles

[AA grumpy]

hello here we are again.

ready for your nightly cuddle up with grumps ?

ok then heres a little snippet i found on the bnp website to tickle your palate.

its another piece of EU lunacy with which we are being bombarded with by the unelected faceless beaurocrats

in brussels.

i,ve left the posted comments in at the bottom.

An award-winning winemaker whose wares are sold at the royal palaces is facing a £30,000 bill after European bureaucrats ruled that he was using the wrong-shaped bottles.

Jerry Schooler, who sells 400,000 bottles of fruit wines and mead a year, has been threatened with prosecution over his determination to use traditional measurements.

The proprietor of the Lurgashall Winery in West Sussex, has been told to halt the sale of beverages such as mead, silver birch wine and bramble liqueur in 75cl and 37.5cl bottles. If he continues to sell them, he could be taken to court under a new EU directive that permits the sale of such products in 70cl, 50cl or 35cl measures only.

The threat from trading standards has concerned Mr Schooler, whose fruit wines and liqueurs have been produced for 24 years and are sold in royal establishments such as Hampton Court and the Tower of London.

“It’s all a nonsense,” he said. “We have been using 75cl and 37.5cl bottles since we started. A trading standards officer would come by once a year to discuss any problems but there have been no difficulties. This year he said the bottles would have to change because of a new directive.”

Mr Schooler now faces costs of about £30,000 to change his production line. “We are going to have to change all our bottling, the labels, machinery, boxes and maybe the corks as well and it is going to cost me thousands to do it,” he said.

“This has just been imposed on us and all we can do is go along with it. We fly the Union Jack and the cross of St George outside the winery and we are very pleased to do it, but sometimes life is made very difficult. I don’t think I shall be flying the EU flag.”

Lurgashall Winery sells ten fruit wines, nine liqueurs, including redcurrant, walnut, ginger and sloe, and seven sorts of mead. The television chef Rick Stein featured the winery in his book and television series Food Heroes and The New York Times Magazine described the mead as the “Dom Pérignon of the genre”.

West Sussex County Council’s trading standards department said that the winery was bound by EU Directive 2007/45/EC, which was drawn up in September to “lay down rules on nominal quantities for prepacked products”. It said the directive meant that the use of 37.5cl bottles for liqueurs was illegal.

Mr Schooler, 74, originally from New England, employs nine full-time and three part-time staff at the winery in a 17th-century barn. Sixty vats hold the various brews, including silver birch wine, the sap for which is collected from nearby woodland. The winery is currently in talks to supply Balmoral mead made from the Queen’s bees in Scotland.

Mr Schooler said that despite his international plaudits, the EU seemed hell-bent on introducing new rules that will cost him money. “We are revitalising a lost industry in the UK,” he said. “I think patriotism and history are very important in the English environment. It is just a pity the EU doesn’t agree.”

Source: The Times & b.n.p website

comments for “Wrong bottles cost winemaker £30,000”

1 It`s horror stories like this that make me all the more determined to secure a BNP government at the earliest opportunity, this elderly gent has been selling his wine for twenty four years without a problem, step forward Blair and co and all of a sudden he`s breaking the law, potentially incurring a fine of thirty thousand pounds, for doing so, how could this evil traitorous government sell out our country to a bunch of bandits masquerading as our saviours, without so much as a backward glance, roll on the 1st May 08 when Londoners will have something to say about their treachery.

2.yep! The small businessmen are not wanted in the new EUSSR. That is why such a huge raft of destructive legislation will hammer British businesses after the Constitreaty Ratification-Ed

3 If I was him I would continue to bottle his wine in exactly the same way, refuse to pay the fine and let all of the major media outlets in on it. What can the EU do? HANG HIM? This is a disgrace.

4. This smells of ‘Common Purpose’, those treacherous jobsworths employed by the councils to “gold plate” every EU directive. There must be some sort of campaign we can mount against this odious organisation, to bring it into the open, as not many people know about it. I have had a few comments shown on the Daily Mail website, but as soon as I mentioned Common Purpose, nothing has appeared, strange that!

5. Absolutely stupid, 75cl is what is known as `a bottle` like 1000mm is one metre. I have long been in dispute with off licences when I have asked for `a bottle` of whisky and they give me 70cl, that was not what I asked for. These EU dictators even want to change their own rules let alone ours, just to demonstrate their power and their contempt for the citizen.

Stop the insanity, vote BNP, especially in May!

6. Can’t they sell as 70cl and 35cl or is it illegal to give the customer more than the declared quantity??

The French would just shrug their shoulders and ignore it.

7. We must stand up as a nation of Englishmen against losing our freedom and identity to the EU. Already a Scotsman has stopped us from voting on EU referendum. We are not allowed to see the St George flag on the BBC. Soon we won’t be allowed to be white and will have to choose a stain, black, brown, coffee, yellow, etc.

8. it IS just to “demonstrate their power” over us.

but we can all be absolutely certain that, unless we rid ourselves of the LibLabConEUIslamist gang and their EUSSR masters, every aspect of our private lives within our own homes,

no matter how trivial or inconsequential, will be subject to EUSSR regulation, backed up by draconian penalties for non-compliance.

this country is at war…”, not this time just with Germany but with the EUSSR and our own treasonous politicians, who plan for us a horrific future. Even George Orwell would have been gobsmacked by the speed and savagery with which it will be imposed once the Lisbon Constitreaty is ratified.

Let us hope that, between now and May 2009, the ballot box will be enough.

If not, our country still cannot afford to lose this war….

9.why is it that EU rules are so rigidly enforced in this country, when everywhere else in Europe they are just flouted. I remember the fishing quota saga, when our own navy was reporting our fishermen for catching too many fish whilst the Spanish navy were actually aiding and abetting Spanish fishermen to conceal their catches!

VOTE BNP & save us all from EU lunacy!