It’s a tiny island, 5,000 miles away from the US (near the pointer). But it’s the source of at least two alcohol beverage products bound for the US market. Hinano Beer (above) is made in Tahiti, French Polynesia and it is imported by mighty Anheuser-Busch. A-B produces and imports a shockingly huge number of alcoholic beverage products — well beyond Bud and Michelob, and this is but one example of the many others.
Another Tahitian product is Manuia Tahiti, Passion Punch. The label suggest it is made with a rum base, but TTB’s qualifications suggest that the base is actually distilled from cane and pineapple. The database shows only a few other alcohol beverage products made in Tahiti, and this makes sense because the island is only 28 miles wide.
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Wine Institute Comment; Top 7 Things to Know
It is likely that all beer, wine and spirits labels will change dramatically in the near future. TTB has been working on new rules since CSPI and other groups submitted a petition in 2003. The new rules would require a “Serving Facts” panel on every container. This panel would include a lot more information, such as the typical serving size, number of servings per container, calories, carbohydrates, protein and fat. Because this is a big, controversial change, TTB has received more than 18,000 public comments during the past few years. There are far too many comments for most people to review, and so we will highlight and summarize the most noteworthy comments here. The most recent proposal and comments are here. This is comment 8 in a series; to see others, click on the “serving facts” tag below.
Wine Institute is the trade association of over 1,000 California wineries and affiliated businesses. Wine Institute’s 34-page comment said:
- Serving facts should not be required. 20 years after putting similar information on food labels, at a cost of about $2 billion, Americans are more obese than ever.
- Some comments link the US Dietary Guidelines with a “standard drink.” This is inappropriate because the term has never appeared in any edition of the Guidelines.
- The 18,000 or so form-generated comments, in response to the advance notice, should carry little weight. They lack credibily and sincerity.
- TTB should maintain the allowance for some wines to refer to “table wine” rather than requiring a more precise alcohol by volume statement “across the board.” The more flexible rule saves wineries money by allowing them to print labels well in advance.
- The 5 ounce serving size for wine should apply to wines up to 16%, rather than 14%.
- TTB should allow “typical values” rather than lot-by-lot analytical values; there is very little gap. Testing every type could cost a medium-sized winery $125,000 per year. This would impose a severe and much higher burden on the wine industry, compared to beer and spirits, because wine is “inherently variable in composition.” Lot-by-lot testing would also lead to substantial delays, as winemakers attempt to twist the blend to conform to the label.
- A three year phase in is helpful but by no means removes the costs. The serving facts panel is likely to require larger labels (about 40% larger). Larger labels could add 0.5 to 1 cent per bottle in label costs alone. A linear format would help and should be allowed.
McGovern Pressing for Modernized Beverage Labeling
Former Senator George McGovern is 86 years old and he’s still slugging away. In the video above, he is urging TTB to mandate calorie and carbohydrate-type serving facts on every beer, wine and spirits label, forthwith. He said:
It’s time for the federal government to issue a regulation that will be useful and … list complete information about the amount of alcohol and calories contained in the drinks we are consuming. … It looks like the government is trying to keep that a secret.
Mr. McGovern has been closely connected to this issue for more than thirty years. His daughter died of acute intoxication in 1994. This 2001 Congressional Research Service Report explains that Mr. McGovern has been pressing for wider nutrition labeling since the 1970s:
The most comprehensive bills for mandated nutrition labeling for most packaged foods and meat products were introduced in the late 1970s by Senator McGovern and Congressman Richmond. Most bills took a more limited approach to mandatory labeling; i.e., sodium labeling. These labeling bills received little attention, and none was enacted. In considering these bills, Congress faced the same dilemma as the agencies. The science was slowly evolving, but there was still inadequate evidence on the relationship of nutrients to chronic disease to require the nutrient content listing proposed to be displayed on packages, and to justify placing this regulatory burden on the food industry in order to provide consumers with additional information.
The consumer groups have been energetically pushing this agenda for many decades, and it’s hard to watch this clip and doubt their resolve to make this happen.
Obama: Where the Line is Drawn
We wrote about President Obama’s appearance, on a beer label, many weeks ago. So we were going to leave the above label alone. But the Hennessy label has received surprisingly little press attention, and a reader reminded us about it. The Hennessy label provides a vivid illustration of where the line is drawn, in the matter of Obama-alcohol-beverage-labeling, and how to do it right and wrong. Hennessy got it right, apparently, by avoiding any direct reference to Mr. Obama (by way of name or likeness). They went right up to the line but did not cross it.
By contrast, as to the beer, Jill Jaracz wrote in to say:
Amid all the hoopla over the Presidential Inauguration, the TTB has officially nixed the idea of putting President Obama’s name and likeness on beverage labels by denying Ommegang Brewery’s application for a single-batch ale called Obamagang that they planned to release around Inauguration Day. TTB denied this label because they do not allow commercial use of someone’s name or likeness without that person’s permission.
In order to comply with the law, the Cooperstown, NY-based Ommegang chose to rename their product Ale 2009, and the new approved keg label depicts that the beer was created in honor of the Inauguration. However, Ommegang’s website still flaunts the ruling a bit by referring to the beer’s intended name “Obamagang,” and featuring the original images.
Brooklyn, NYC’s Sixpoint Craft Ales had registered the name Hop Obama Ale a few months ago, but the status of this label is now surrendered.
The Washington Post mentioned Sixpoint’s label problem here, and Bill Dowd at The Examiner covered it here.
The Hennessy ad is kind of hard to read and says: “In honor of the 44th President, Hennessy will make a donation to the Thurgood Marshall College Fund for every Limited Edition bottle purchased. Each one is a unique and individually numbered piece of history.” TTB helped ensure it would be a limited edition by allowing the 44 label for 6 months and 15,000 cases only.
The Washington Legal Foundation Comment; Top 6 Things to Know
It is likely that all beer, wine and spirits labels will change dramatically in the near future. TTB has been working on new rules since CSPI and other groups submitted a petition in 2003. The new rules would require a “Serving Facts” panel on every container. This panel would include a lot more information, such as the typical serving size, number of servings per container, calories, carbohydrates, protein and fat. Because this is a big, controversial change, TTB has received more than 18,000 public comments during the past few years. There are far too many comments for most people to review, and so we will highlight and summarize the most noteworthy comments here. The most recent proposal and comments are here. This is comment 7 in a series; to see others, click on the “serving facts” tag below.
The Washington Legal Foundation (WLF) is a national, nonprofit public interest law and policy center in Washington. WLF’s comment explains:
- The Serving Facts rule would make alcohol beverage labels much more similar to food, supplement and OTC drug labels.
- WLF objects to what the rule would prohibit, rather than what it would require. The rule would prohibit advice on standard drinks and moderate drinking, from the US Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and drink equivalency graphics.
- TTB may not ban truthful and non-misleading information such as this, from beverage labels. Here, “TTB has offered no evidence of how and to what extent consumers may be misled by basic, truthful information.”
- WLF promotes policies consistent with a free-market economy and defends the rights of individuals and businesses to conduct their affairs without excessive intervention from government regulators. WLF is especially interested in protecting commercial speech rights — both the right of speakers to provide, and consumers to receive, information.
- Even alcohol beverage labels are protected by the First Amendment. This proposal would violate that Constitutional provision. The proposal is directly at odds with Rubin v. Coors and the Central Hudson cases decided by the US Supreme Court. TTB has no business keeping people in the dark about these things.
- “Irrationality pervades TTB’s” proposal. This agency is suppressing information another federal agency seeks to disseminate. TTB seeks to ban the information on labels but allow it on websites and ads. It is illogical.
Dr. Koop is Serious About Beer and Fat
Bob Skilnik does a good job covering the serving facts issue, as to alcohol beverages, and we must admit we got this idea from his recent post here. The above video shows former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop extolling the need for adding serving facts information to beer, wine and spirits labels without further ado. We wanted to highlight this video because it seems quite effective, whether you agree or disagree. That is, we think it is effective especially when compared to many of the written comments submitted to TTB over the past few years. We have summarized many of the written comments on this blog; some are quite persuasive and a great many are, shall we say, lame. We find it particularly lame to assert, for example, everybody knows that beer has no fat, so it’s a waste to force beer companies to declare it. The same could be said about alcohol content. Everybody knows beer is about 3-5% alcohol by volume. Except when it isn’t. Maybe it happens to be 13.4% alc./vol. or 21% alc./vol. or 2.16% alc./vol. Where is the harm in telling consumers, simply and directly, that Guinness Stout has no fat, just like a low carb beer or a sugared-up flavored malt beverage?
Yes; it will be expensive and cumbersome to add serving facts information to hundreds of thousands of alcohol beverage products, but it’s too easy to say nobody cares, or consumers already know. In a few days, we plan to summarize Dr. Koop’s written comment on the same topic.
The second reason we wanted to highlight this particular video clip is that it seems to have only 232 views in YouTube as of this writing. Again, whether you agree or disagree, we thought it’s a good issue that should have more viewings.