I’m conscious that although this website is titled “Wandering Winetasters’ Website” there are not many mentions of wine and the various wine producers that we visit.

As soon as time permits a new section is coming in which we will talk about the places where we bought wine, how much it cost and how it compares with supermarket wine and more specialised wine sellers here in the UK.

Since Brexit the amount of wine and other goods that can be brought back into the UK from the EU has been restricted, per person it is currently 18 litres of still wine, that’s 24 normal bottles, plus either 4 litres of spirits or 9 litres of sparkling wine, that’s a dozen normal bottles. There are other allowances but we are only interested in the wines. As usual, the government is punitive if you go over any of the allowances, for example if you have one bottle of wine over the allowance then you have to declare it and pay duty etc on the whole lot — greedy government is the only way to describe it.

We are always very careful to make sure that we don’t go over the duty free allowance when returning to the UK. Another point is that you are also entitled to reclaim the VAT on your EU purchases, however, that’s another article, it’s not easy and so far we have not managed to reclaim VAT.