A DECISION by one of the State’s leading supermarket chains to sell two bottles of red wine for just €5 today as part of a special promotional campaign has been condemned as “irresponsible” by Minister of State for Health Róisín Shortall.
The discounted price on bottles of Italian Montepulciano D’Abruzzo DOC (2010) was also criticised by Prof Joe Barry, head of the department of public health and primary care at the Trinity College Centre for Health Sciences and a leading campaigner against alcohol abuse.
He said the below-cost selling tactic sent out all the wrong messages on alcohol consumption.
A bottle of wine attracts excise duty of €2.72, to which Vat at 21 per cent must be added, so the Lidl price for two bottles will not even cover its tax bill, never mind the production and shipping costs.
Ms Shortall said she was “disappointed” by the price.
“It is irresponsible to be selling alcohol so cheaply and it is clearly a loss-leader. My concern is that we’ve reached a point where alcohol is viewed like any other product but it is not – it is a potentially dangerous one and is not like milk or bread.”
She said she was committed to introducing minimum pricing on alcohol and said it would form a key element of the forthcoming national substance misuse strategy.
Minimum pricing is the lowest price at which alcohol can be sold, and the cost of a product is based on the number of units of alcohol it contains.
The more units in a bottle, the higher the price. It affects people directly in relation to how much they drink so primarily hits heavy drinkers and young people who are more likely to consume low-cost alcohol.
The Lidl price promotion was “not a good idea from a health perspective”, said Prof Barry.
“Obviously consumers like to be able to buy things for less but alcohol is simply not another commodity. These are pocket-money prices. Lidl are selling this below cost and are clearly doing it because it will get them some attention and will get people through their doors but I think it is a very bad idea.”
The retailer defended its promotion and said the normal price of the wine was €3.99. It stressed that the two-for-€5 deal was a limited “Super Saturday” offer.
The price of alcohol in Irish supermarkets has fallen dramatically since the abolition in 2006 of the Groceries Order, which had outlawed below-cost selling. It now costs more than 50 per cent less to drink at home than it did in 1996.
The alcohol market in Ireland is worth more than €6 billion a year and off-sales are frequently used as a loss leader by supermarkets.
Some 95 per cent of all carry-out business is done by five companies: Tesco, Dunnes Stores, Centra, Spar and Costcutter. Lidl is a relatively small player in the market.
€2.50 A BOTTLE DOES IT PASS THE TASTE TEST?
NOT REALLY, to be honest, and we are unlikely to be putting this into our Lidl shopping basket today – or, indeed, ever again.
While wines from this region of Italy are often said to have a rustic charm to them, this particular bottle was found to be way more rough than rustic.
The general consensus among the many tasters recruited by The Irish Times to try the wine yesterday afternoon was that while they had tasted worse – often, perhaps in Leeson Street nightclubs at 4am at a cost of about 20 times what Lidl is charging today – nobody went as far as to describe the wine as nice, or even vaguely drinkable.
It was surprisingly acidic, excessively dry and had a sharp and unpleasant aftertaste. While they could not be 100 per cent sure, all the tasters did express concern that the consequences of drinking just a little too much of this would be a fairly hefty headache that would be anything but good value.
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Conor Pope