Smith StuartSALE AND SUPPLY OF ALCOHOL (WINERY CELLAR DOOR TASTING) AMENDMENT BILLThird ReadingSTUART SMITH (National—Kaikōura): I move That the Sale and Supply of Alcohol (Winery Cellar Door Tasting) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. When I first proposed this bill I did so because the current Act isn't fit for purpose for our winery cellar doors—in two ways which I will explain.First right now if you go to one of our beautiful winery cellar doors that just holds an off-licence meaning you can buy wine to take home that winery is not allowed to charge you a tasting fee if you try samples of the wine. The winery bears the cost of the wine itself the staff who pour it the excise tax and all the other overheads associated with providing this service. This does not properly put a value on the premium product. The change in the bill allows wineries to charge and defines a sample as being no more than 35 millilitres—which is I think 7 teaspoons.Second you'll know that some of our wineries have cafes and restaurants as well. The way the law works now is that they have to hold two different licences and to make that happen they have to have set up another business another legal entity just to charge for tastings. This is expensive and unnecessary. What the bill does is allow a cellar door to share exactly the same licence footprint as a cafe or a restaurant without the need to create a separate business or use a separate building. This change gives winery cellar doors the same flexibility that hotels and taverns already have.During the select committee stage a change was made that requires a cellar door to make snack food available when charging for wine samples. Snack food" is a term that's already defined in regulations but it's basically things like potato chips biscuits and crackers. Some businesses may decide that they want to offer more than that—say cheese platters for example—which would be welcomed by myself if they chose to do that but the minimum is defined in the Act.Winery cellar doors are tourism businesses and they often are quite seasonal businesses. The industry association New Zealand Winegrowers mentioned at the select committee stage that the summer season is the busiest time for many of these cellar doors. What this means if this bill passes successfully today is that these important changes will allow cellar doors to be able to start using the flexibility straight away just in time for the summer season.This at its heart is a much-needed upgrade to the legislation which is out of date. Now I read that into the Hansard for a very good reason. Those people that are charged with administering the alcohol legislation and anyone who knows—and certainly having had a cellar door myself or a licensed premises that sometimes it can be difficult when there's a line ball call. I wanted Parliament's intent to be very clear in this piece of legislation so that there is no doubt about where the line falls on this. This is intended to allow wineries to charge for tastings. This has been quite a bone of contention in some jurisdictions about the way in which the law has been interpreted and when a licence is renewed it's interpreted in a different way. Hence I wanted that read into the Hansard.So at their heart wineries are producing a primary product and then manufacturing it into a consumer product to be sold. As the 6th-largest export good New Zealand wine is a success with over $2 billion worth of exports. When I first joined the wine industry it was around $100 million of exports. There's been a tremendous amount of growth along the way and that's no small part to the impact that cellar doors have had along the way. We have cellar doors right around the country—I've visited a cellar door in Northland and I've visited them all around the country right down into the south of Otago or the south of Central Otago I suppose it would be termed as. But we have some wonderful cellar doors around New Zealand from really large wineries to quite small ones. We had the one of the largest ones Pernod Ricard give evidence that they couldn't charge for tastings on some occasions even though they had a restaurant because they lacked staff sometimes to open the restaurant and therefore couldn't charge for tastings.So this bill will help them but also some very small wineries. The one that springs to mind is Tupari in Marlborough in my patch who have a vineyard which is about 13 kilometres away from State Highway 1 it's quite remote. So they are able under this bill to have—and they already have a cellar door on State Highway 1 right along the cycle trail the rail trail which they will now be able to charge for the tastings when the tourists cycle past or come down by the steam train that travels down there during the summer. So this bill will be a great help to them.There's over 6000 people who work directly in the wine industry with 12000 people in the rest of the economy who benefit from working in or with the wine industry. So it's quite an important industry. But what makes wine different is what the French term as "terroir" which is effectively in my translation anyway the place in which the wine is produced and the people that produce it and the methods that they use the soil that it's grown from and those various practices. And that's what makes each wine quite different. One is quite different from the other. A Marlborough sauvignon blanc—they're not all the same. Or a Hawke's Bay chardonnay—they are not all the same. The individual influence from the people that grew the grapes that actually made the wine really does come through in those wines and that is what makes a cellar door experience what it is.People come right around the world just to do this to go to New Zealand and taste wines. They will travel around those wineries and try lots of wines. If they've come on a cruise ship they're not able to buy wine and take it back onto the cruise ship with them so some cellar doors have been reluctant to have cruise ship passengers to visit them because they would have to give too much wine away and not really get anything for it. It may translate into sales when they get back into their home country but it doesn't really do the cellar door a lot of good. So this bill is absolutely essential for that. That tourism offering goes much wider than the wine industry and I've witnessed this myself. The halo effect of the New Zealand wine industry goes over other goods and makes it easier to sell those goods because it is seen internationally that if you can make quality wine you have a certain status that you wouldn't have otherwise. So that flows over into our other goods. So this is not just a wine story this is a New Zealand story.We have some fantastic businesses like Rocket Lab and all these tech industries but it's this industry that comes from the land that reflects not only the soil and the place that it comes from but the people that make it. And so it's with great pleasure that I commend this bill to the House."