Has Brexit killed off the booze cruise? How to get the most out of a French shopping trip by ferry

It all started with the wine rack, which had been glaring back at us, near-empty, since we bought it five years ago. It holds 48 bottles.

During the first year of ownership my girlfriend and I had managed to half fill it on a semi regular basis, but as time passed and lethargy crept in we barely managed to populate the top row.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was catching my two-year-old stowing her beaker of milk in the rack, making it the only item present aside from a half-drunk bottle of squash. We needed to stock up. We needed a booze cruise.

For anyone unfamiliar with this very British tradition, a booze cruise amounts to a short trip by ferry from Britain to France with the sole aim of buying vast quantities of cheap alcohol. This was to be our maiden voyage.

We checked our diaries and booked a car ferry to Calais, with the sole intention of raiding one of the port’s giant hypermarkets on arrival and filling our boot (along with the back seats) with as much cut-price wine as we could carry. To add some much-needed glamour to the trip we also made a reservation for the night at a hotel a 20-minute drive along the coast.

We then booked the in-laws for childcare, and began dreaming of a full wine rack, living out its full potential. By our estimations we would return to the UK with around 200 bottles.

But we hit an immediate snag. In the almost two-year fog of Covid-19 we had forgotten about the implications of Britain leaving the European Union. In short, Brexit is bad news for wine racks. Were we still part of the EU, my partner and I would have been able to return to Dover with as much alcohol as we could cart, so long as it was intended for our own consumption.

Post January 2021, however, things are a lot less generous. Brexit reintroduced strict limits on what you can bring back from the EU, restrictions that have not been in place since 1993. These days, you can bring back 18 litres or 24 bottles of wine; for beer the limit is 42 litres; spirits are capped at four litres total; while sparkling wine is a strict nine litres or 12 bottles.

Fortunately, those limits are per person not per car, something we only realised once we were already on the ferry over. Suddenly, our miserly alcohol allowance doubled before our eyes. The excitement…