Unfortunately, the EU Is What Many US Politicians Long to Emulate
From the Times, via Daniel Mitchell at Cato:
An award-winning winemaker whose wares are sold at the royal palaces is
facing a £30,000 bill after European bureaucrats ruled that he was
using the wrong-shaped bottles. Jerry Schooler, who sells 400,000
bottles of fruit wines and mead a year, has been threatened with
prosecution over his determination to use traditional measurements. The
proprietor of the Lurgashall Winery in West Sussex, has been told to
halt the sale of beverages such as mead, silver birch wine and bramble
liqueur in 75cl and 37.5cl bottles. If he continues to sell them, he
could be taken to court under a new EU directive that permits the sale
of such products in 70cl, 50cl or 35cl measures only. "¦Mr Schooler now
faces costs of about £30,000 to change his production line. "We are
going to have to change all our bottling, the labels, machinery, boxes
and maybe the corks as well and it is going to cost me thousands to do
it," he said. "¦West Sussex County Council's trading standards
department said that the winery was bound by EU Directive 2007/45/EC,
which was drawn up in September to "lay down rules on nominal
quantities for prepacked products". It said the directive meant that
the use of 37.5cl bottles for liqueurs was illegal.
Don't miss his other story of passengers having to hop off buses every 30 miles to satisfy EU regulations. The latter regulation is actually one that is remarkably similar to railroad regulation in the US, where a crew day was defined as something like 100 miles. Modern freight railroads were having to change crews every two hours - I don't know if that one is still on the books.
