Alison Jasper, the mother refused a bottle of wine at a supermarket checkout because her 17-year-old daughter was with her, writes about her embarrassing experience. And she says: "What do we do with teenagers - leave them outside tied up with the dogs." I am the mother who was refused wine in Tesco. My husband and I, both in our mid-40s, were buying our normal week's shopping thinking it would be nice to buy a bottle of wine for our evening’s meal.

Can I just say we had one - ONE! - bottle of white wine in our shopping trolley. Our 17-year-old daughter was helping us to pack when the cashier asked her for ID. We said that she didn't have any, but that she wasn't buying the wine anyway, we were. Nobody asked me or my husband for ID. If they felt we looked under 21 they should have asked.

The wine was confiscated at the check-out, in front of a queue of customers, on the grounds that "we might be going to give it to her to take to a party".

White wine - hardly a teenagers' tipple of choicePeople were looking at us and it was embarrassing. It was at the end of the day so we decided not to make a fuss. It was not worth the fight plus we wanted to get out of there a quickly as possible.

But I would like to ask since when has a bottle of white wine been the tipple of choice for teenagers?

We don't blame the cashier, she was obviously doing as she had been told and did not want to be at risk of mis-selling.

However, when we rang Tesco head office to check their policy, we were told they didn't care who drank the alcohol, they only cared about selling it and they would have not sold it without any ID. But it was not for my daughter, it was for us.

How does embarrassing a middle-aged couple help?We have no problems with the "no alcohol for under 18s policy". We applaud sensible measures taken to reduce under-age drinking, but I'd like to know how embarrassing one middle-aged couple at a check-out is going to reduce this.

What next? Will they start refusing customers bread knives or solvents for fear of giving them to somebody to sniff? It is just ridiculous and stupid.

Our other daughter of nearly 19 has been refused to buy alcohol when she didn't have ID with her, and our whole family sees that as perfectly reasonable.

I would like to get across that we are not challenging Tesco’s policy. It’s absolutely fine. But the cashier made us look like we were untrustworthy and that we were about to buy alcohol illegally. We all felt very humiliated.

It's many years since I looked under 18! Nobody at Tesco has been able to tell me what we are supposed to do if we want to buy a bottle of wine for dinner when accompanied by teenage children - apparently leave them outside tied up with the dogs!

Read the story that started the debate>>>and have your say on the Speak Out, below.