Lawsuit may force feds to add nutrition and ingredient labels to wine

Three leading consumer groups claim it’s time for “basic transparency”

The other shoe has dropped in the wine ingredient and nutrition label discussion.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, which is about as big-time as these kinds of groups get, has joined two other consumer-focused policy organizations to force the federal government to add the labels to wine.

This week, the center, the Consumer Federation of America and the National Consumers League sued the Treasury department, which oversees booze regulation. The groups claim the federal government has failed to act on a 19-year-old petition urging it to require alcohol labeling “with the same basic transparency consumers expect in foods.”

And yes, I’ve been writing about this subject for so long that I think I reported about that original petition.

Having said that, the suit might be grandstanding and not have legal merit; I got that sense from one attorney. Nevertheless, the publicity surrounding the suit could significantly change the dynamic around ingredient and nutrition labels. Currently, they’re optional and rarely used in wine, and still face tremendous opposition among the wine business (as we saw last week on the blog).

Now, though, the Treasury may be forced to defend its policy in open court for not requiring them or go ahead and require them, which it has been lax to do. Ironically, the Treasury’s Tax and Trade Bureau, the federal alcohol cop, has started the process to institute some sort of labeling system.

But, as I reported in August, the wine business seemed to mostly ignore that development. The industry’s two leading trade groups declined comment, and one of them wasn’t even aware what was going on. Now, though, they had better pay attention.