Revenue’s missive over my cheap wine struck abject fear into my bones

In the real world, when life is normal, a group of my oldest friends and I are on a dinner party circuit. We take it in turns to host but everyone brings a course with them. One of my friends’ wives does the best potatoes ever in the Aga, so that’s a given. I usually bring cheese and port. Someone else brings the salads and desserts.

The host does the main course and the wine, though everyone brings nice wine anyway on the understanding it’s a gift to be enjoyed later, not drunk on the day.

After a lot of trial and error, the ‘house’ wine for these gatherings is a Portuguese red called Porta 6. It’s a classic mid-range wine, fruity and palatable, and everyone likes it, so it works for us.

In off-licences, it’s €12.95 a bottle, though you’ll often see it on special for €10 or even €8 recently, at which point you buy half a dozen just to have them in stock. Imagine my surprise, then, when I opened Facebook one night and saw an ad selling it at €3.50 per 75cl bottle, plus shipping and VAT. Nonetheless, when that was taken into account, it still came to just €37.70 for six.

Of course, I should have been smarter than to believe it — if a bargain looks too much like a bargain, there’s probably something awry. And so it proved.

The thought popped into my head one day that it was taking a while to arrive, so I checked my email, where a tracker told me it was sitting in a sorting office in Dublin — and literally minutes later, the postman arrived with one of those heartstopping brown envelopes with a harp on it.

It was from Revenue, and it read: ‘Notice is hereby given that certain goods, to wit 4.5 litres of wine, were seized by me, pursuant to Section 141 of the Finance Act 2001, at Dublin Parcel Hub, the said goods being liable to forfeiture under Section 125 of the Act.’

Leaving aside the rather florid Victorian language — ‘to wit’, ‘seized’, ‘pursuant’, ‘forfeiture’ — that made me feel as chastened as a pirate, it also was a little scary because, on the back, it added ‘where a customs offence is committed, the offender is liable to prosecution’.

Now, I probably should have researched all this beforehand, but I assumed tax had been paid in Portugal and we actually had that thing that has been front and centre in the news for five years now, an EU Single Market. If I can buy a vacuum cleaner from Amazon in Germany, it didn’t occur to me that six bottles of wine from Lisbon would be an issue.

In my own head, this conviction was strengthened by the fact that when I take the car to France, I legally can bring back 120 bottles, never mind six, without paying an extra cent in duty, and even that only is a guideline. If you can prove you’re having a roundy birthday celebration, or your wedding in a marquee, and you’re supplying all the alcohol, there really is no limit at all.

Have it posted to you, though, and next thing you know, you’re getting a terrifying letter warning you’ll be clamped in irons. A little probing revealed this has happened to dozens of others, most of whom have just let it go rather than enter into the process of having the excise duty calculated and paid in order to have the goods released.

If Revenue are aware of these ads on Facebook, they should mount a public information campaign warning that having alcohol shipped from another country, even one in the EU, will attract extra charges. And maybe, given the times in which we live, when so much commerce has moved online, they could reword the stupid letter into slightly warmer English — ‘you may be unaware, but etc…’ — rather than sending a missive that gave me an instant palpitation because I thought I’d just be nabbed for organising the crime of the century.

As for the wine, well, I decided not to bother going through the hassle of paying extra duty, but the gods were on my side. On Tuesday, completely unbidden, it showed up on my doorstep anyway. I have no idea how. I have no idea why. But I do know that when it’s allowed, the 11 of us from six households already have our next stash ready to be popped.