It’s another case of tradition tied-up by red tape, and it is threatening the livelihoods of Monchique’s small distilleries – not to mention “the sustainability of the whole mountain region”.
Campaigning PSD politician Mendes Bota has jumped on the case with fellow deputies Pedro Roque and Cristovão Norte, sending his concerns to colleagues in the government.
The issue centres on the way ‘melosa’, a honey-flavoured local brandy, is produced.
Customs officials in Portimão have decided that it is not consistent with the methods usually used in a small distillery, and that these little businesses should therefore lose their tax advantages and be treated as normal distilleries,which pay double for their licences.
“Unless there is a better opinion, this communication signals the death-knell of these small producers – threatening their own survival and that of a region that just in the last decades of the 20th century lost more than half its population,” writes Mendes Bota in his appeal to the government.
The Portimão customs delegation’s decision needs rapid re-evaluation, says Bota, otherwise it will simply lead to further desertification and the giving-up of small producers altogether.
‘Melosa’ is one of Monchique’s most well-known products and is basically a form of honey-flavoured ‘medronho’.
One of Bota’s other concerns is whether this is a decision that just affects the Algarve or whether it will be taken up on a national level, affecting small distilleries elsewhere in the country, producing their own traditional spirit drinks.
