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In September, the court proceedings on the public prosecutor's allegations of fraud against six people from the Catalan producers' association Grupo Reserva de la Tierra will begin. According to the public prosecutor, they allegedly labelled about 40 million bottles of cheap table wine as wines of the DOQ Priorat and the DOs Terra Alta, Tarragona, Catalunya and Montsant between 2019 and 2021, thus earning more than 14 million euros annually. The alleged fraud was discovered in October, when an official inspection revealed irregularities in the production figures.
According to the Catalan newspaper Ara, Reserva de la Tierra is accused of having sold 22.4 million bottles labelled as coming from the DO Terra Alta. This figure is 13 times higher than the allowed one and exceeds the total production reported by the wineries in the area by five million bottles. In Priorat the figure was allegedly nine times higher than allowed and in Tarragona 25 times higher than authorised.
In internal mails, indications of possible concealment strategies of the company were found. For example, there was discussion about "hiding the main warehouse as if it belonged to another company". Police also discovered around 81,000 fake DO labels supplied by a sticker manufacturer in Murcia.
The falsely labelled wines, according to the allegations, were also sold in supermarkets such as Lidl and Aldi. According to the judge, Reserva de la Tierra proposed in July 2020 to destroy a batch of wine destined for Lidl after many complaints about its inferior quality. He also accuses the company of simply removing unauthorised additives from the list of ingredients in wines destined for Japan, instead of changing its wine-making process to comply with these standards. Reserva de la Tierra has sold large quantities of wine with different labels and also in Europe, the USA, China and Brazil. The investigating prosecutor stated: "The economic damage caused to the buyers of these millions of bottles can never be calculated."
(al / source: drinksbusiness; photo: 123rf)
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