Could labelling wines as ‘easily digestible’ have serious health implications?

The European Commission and the Council of Ministers are not the only institutions that can boast a familiarity with wine.

In a judgment delivered last Thursday (6 September), the European Court of Justice (ECJ) took issue with a German wine’s claim to be “easily digestible”. The court found that a description of the wine on the bottle label as “mild edition – gentle acidity/easily digestible” constituted a health claim that should be controlled by an EU law forbidding people making health claims for alcoholic drinks.

The wine-growing co-operative Deutsches Weintor argued that the description ‘easily digestible’ did not refer to health but only to general wellbeing.

Germany’s federal administrative court had asked the ECJ to rule on whether the EU law covered the “easily digestible” claim.

While the ECJ did not dispute that the wine in question was easily digestible (the German co-operative that makes it uses a special process of acidity reduction), it said that the claim was incomplete.

The judges observed: “The concept of a ‘health claim’ must cover not only a relationship implying an improvement in health as a result of the consumption of a food, but also any relationship which implies the absence or reduction of effects that are adverse or harmful to health and which would otherwise accompany or follow such consumption, and, therefore, the mere preservation of a good state of health despite that potentially harmful consumption.”

From which Entre Nous concludes that no one is in any danger of describing ECJ judgments as easily digestible.