Dec 16 2008
And the tax man takes it all…
In the past 25% VAT now 20% VAT on wine Hungary’s government is still a winner while the wine maker and the consumer left on the side
Well they did reduce the tax from the massive 25%, but then they imposed other excise. And this as a traditional wine producing country were domestic consumption is the most significant
I do acknowledge the importance of tax as a collected money from the people it should be spend wisely, preferably for the good of the people. Okay, call me an idealist and you’re probably right. Yet it drives me nuts when I see that Hungarian wines could actually be much more affordable for the Hungarian people (and for everybody else) if they would penalize the wine makers less. Yet it has to be stressed that some wines are general priced higher for whatever reason (e.g. some red wines), but let’s discuss this another time.
I did recently a quick calculation -I usually hate to do comparison as I find then unfair yet it seemed interesting- on how much wine you could in theory buy from a basic monthly salary. There might a bias yet I came with following up.
Let’s say you earn 1200 GBP in London and you spend all of it on wine. The average bottle price is around 4 GBP yet I say let’s buy a better wine for 8 GBP. You can get a rather nice bottle for that money. In Hungary lets say the equivalent salary is around 100.000 HUF (approximately 340 GBP) and you have to spend around 1500 HUF (5 GBP) for a correct bottle of wine. Now lets divide these two in a separately.
1200/8= 150, you can buy 150 bottles of (good) wine from your UK salary
100.000/1.500= 67, you can buy 67 bottles of (good) wine from your Hungarian salary.
I put good in brackets as I want to reflect we’re not going to buy the cheapest plonk, but a moderately priced, more then decent bottle of wine on our monthly salary. As I mentioned earlier there might be a bias and I’m not a fan of such a comparison as it can be interpreted as unfair. Yet it should reflect my point, that in a wine country, wines (and I mean bottled and of good quality) must be more affordable for the general public and everyone should have the pleasure to open a good bottle of wine on the table now and again.
VAT for wine got changed, back to back 25%, Hungary is hereby (probably) gold medal winner when it comes to taxing (by VAT) its national product, wine (and many other things)…
Hungarian wine prices are some sort of funny (or simply sometimes hard to crasp). How is it possible that the same Hungarian wine (e.g. Szepsy Aszú 6 puttonyos, according to wine-searcher.com) is more expensive in Hungary then it is in the UK? Can´t explain it, if we would talk about bigger quantities then I some sort would understand…
Try to buy in Hungary a decent case of wine for 12000 HUF (1000 HUF/ wine), good luck, I know its easier to do in the UK…
I shall post an article on this in the future…