Some winemakers keep consumers in the dark about the alcohol content of their products.

Some winemakers keep consumers in the dark about the alcohol content of their products.

That pinot noir you enjoy a couple of glasses of at dinner hits the spot – fragrant, full flavoured and smooth. And at 12.5%, its alcohol level is pretty moderate, right?

Well, maybe. Its real alcohol content might be as low as 11% or as high as 14%. Under New Zealand’s loose labelling laws, you simply don’t know how strong a wine is.

With beer, labels have to be accurate to within 0.3 percentage points of the actual level of alcohol, and spirits have a permitted tolerance of 0.5 percentage points. But wine has a whopping tolerance of 1.5 percentage points, which means that wines of 11% or 14% alcohol can legally display the same level on their labels.

Why does New Zealand have such a slack approach to alcohol declarations on wine labels? “We’re wondering that ourselves,” says

Andy Towers, a senior lecturer in the school of health sciences at Massey University. “We have an issue with drink-driving in New Zealand and Kiwis need accurate labels on alcohol … What we need to say [to the wine industry] is … sort it out.”

In the European Union, which produces more than half the world’s wine, the permitted tolerance level for alcohol declarations on wine labels is 0.5 percentage points. New Zealand formerly had a tolerance of 10% (meaning that wine labelled as 12.5% alc/vol could be anywhere between 11.25% and 13.75%), but when the Australia New Zealand Food Standards Code was introduced in 2002, Wellington accepted Canberra’s even laxer rule.

So why is Australia so loose with its wine labels? One major study concluded that the alcohol levels in the world’s wines have soared in recent decades, partly in response to consumers’ preference for full-bodied, richly flavoured wine.

But apparently consumers don’t want to know about the higher alcohol that comes with such a wine style, so if they can, winemakers simply round their stated alcohol levels down.

Experts say it’s easy in a laboratory to measure the alcohol level in wine precisely, to within a range of 0.1 percentage points. It’s time the wine industry here treated consumers with greater respect.