My last post was all about death. Thank you for all the kind thoughts and comments that followed.

This one is about life’s other certainty, taxes.

While death may be complicated , it’s nothing compared to Australia’s approach to taxing alcohol.

Taxing alcohol should be simple – if alcohol is bad, make that basis of the tax and align the tax to the alcohol level, an approach recommended by the Australian Chronic Disease Prevention Alliance. 

The introduction of the GST at the turn of this century was the perfect opportunity to address this, but like all attempts to reform taxes in this country, we end up with a compromise, a patch-up, the ambition being scuttled by various industry lobby groups, or the government itself. It’s happening now with electric vehicles, a good thing, being hit by a tax to recuperate the loss of excise from fuel – a bad thing.

When GST was introduced, to the soulful chords of Joe Cocker singing ‘Unchain My Heart’, it was added to the current Excise Tariff act of 1921 for beer and spirits, but a new tax was devised for the wine industry, the Wine Equalisation Tax, or WET. 

Tax on beer and spirits is based on the level of alcohol, but the WET is set at 29% of the wholesale price. Why? As the Australian National Audit Office puts it:

‘The wine tax was introduced to maintain or ‘equalise’ wine prices and revenue from wine sales at levels prevailing at the time of the introduction of the GST and abolition of the Wholesale Sales Tax in 2000 in order to avoid ‘dramatic and dislocating price fall’.

For that reason, WET gets even more complicated. It applies to some, but not all fortified wines, likewise cider and perry (apple based bubbly). There’s also a rebate for smaller producers. To quote the ANAO again, ‘There is considerable complexity in calculating the wine tax.’ They got that right.

The new craze for Seltzer shows just how daft the laws are. A beer-based seltzer is taxed at half the rate of a spirit one even with the same level of alcohol.

I’m not suggesting we pay more tax. Far from it, but why not keep it simple: beer at 5% alcohol, is taxed at 5%, wine at 13% and spirits at 40% etc? That way you wouldn’t be taxed more for a good wine that a cheap alcoholic one.

As for the amber nectar, while I’d like to have a beer with Duncan, I’d rather have one with Dieter – Germans pay 13 cents per litre beer tax, while in Australia it’s 17 times that at $2.26.

My brother, who lives in Germany, tells me that you can get beer in hospital there.

I used to work in a bottle shop in Hawthorn, Melbourne. Once a week, a little old lady would rock up with her shopping trolley, or jeep, as she called it, to purchase a flagon of McWilliams sherry. She’d worked out that tax complexities and arrived at the best bang for buck. If only she’d worked for the ATO.

Meanwhile, what is going on with Sainsbury’s in the UK? An old school friend who now resides in Southampton recommended Reserve de Bonpas, Côtes du Rhone for eight pounds and 25 pence a bottle – roughly $15. Another old mate pointed out that it’s even better in the north of England as it only costs seven pounds fifty. Is the south subsidising the north? I hope so.

Pricing is tricky even without taxes. In 1995 I found some 1983 Chateau Mouton Rotshchild at the local supermarket – this was in France – for about $40 (I think). It should have been well over $100 but the supermarket, being a quiet rural one hadn’t updated the price for several years. I wish we’d bought a case rather than a bottle.

And finally, a recommendation. 2018 Rob Oatley, Margaret River Cabernet Sauvignon. This came in a mixed dozen from Qantas and I’m pretty sure it averaged out at $16 a bottle. They have run out, but you can still get it at Dan Murphy for just over $20. It’s a textbook Cabernet Sauvignon. Halliday gave it 95 points.