Feds to Allow Nutrition Labels on Wine, Beer, Spirit Bottles

Alcohol beverages soon could have nutritional labels like those on food packaging, but only if the producers want to put them there.

The Treasury Department, which regulates alcohol, said this past week that beer, wine and spirits companies can use labels that include serving size, servings per container, calories, carbohydrates, protein and fat per serving. Such package labels have never before been approved.

The labels are voluntary, so it will be up to beverage companies to decide whether to use them on their products.

The decision is a temporary, first step while the Alcohol and Tobacco Trade and Tax Bureau, or TTB, continues to consider final rules on alcohol labels. Rules proposed in 2007 would have made labels mandatory, but the agency never made the rules final.

The labeling regulation, issued May 28, comes after a decade of lobbying by hard liquor companies and consumer groups, with clearly different goals.

The liquor companies want to advertise low calories and low carbohydrates in their products. Consumer groups want alcoholic drinks to have the same transparency as packaged foods, which are required to be labeled.

"This is actually bringing alcoholic beverages into the modern era," says Guy Smith, an executive vice president at Diageo, the world's largest distiller and maker of such well-known brands as Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Jose Cuervo and Tanqueray.

Diageo asked the bureau in 2003 to allow the company to add that information to its products as low-carbohydrate diets were gaining in popularity.