Counterfeiting “steals” 6.1 billion euros a year from the wine and spirits sector in the EU

Counterfeiting is, to date, one of the major problems affecting the world wine market. News of fraud, of the discovery of false bottles, of great wines and more, are commonplace. And to calculate the “bill” , very high, for the wine & spirits sector, at European level, is the Euipo, the EU office for the protection of intellectual property, which in its latest report 2019, estimates that the sector has lost on average, every year, between 2012 and 2016, something like 2.4 billion euros in direct sales (6% of total) because of counterfeits, a figure that reaches 6.1 billion euros considering the total turnover, with a significant cost in terms of labor, with 38.885 jobs lost due to the counterfeiting industry, and 2.1 billion euros in unpaid taxes. An important portion is, therefore, the counterfeiting of wine and spirits, out of a European total, among the various sectors, which estimates losses of 92.3 billion euros each year.