Yes, wine duty HAS gone up again

You might be justified in thinking that the Chancellor had let off Britain's winedrinkers in the Budget a couple of days ago. Sadly not.

Basically he didn't interfere with an inflation-linked rise in duty which had already been put in place by the previous government. Duty will in fact go up by 7.2% - that's roughly 15p a bottle.

As Gavin Quinney of Chateau Bauduc points out in his passionately argued blog post today that makes Britain's wine duty the highest in Europe.

Most retailers are saying that they won't be putting up their prices immediately. But they will over the next few weeks, no doubt about it.

Not that I think that's any cause to panic buy unless you've run low on your favourite tipple. There will always be deals. But there will be still less variety on the supermarket shelf or interesting wines coming into the country and that is depressing.