Surplus wine becomes biofuel
BRUSSELS (Reuters) – The European Union has opened a tender to sell unwanted wine lakes in four countries for use in making bioethanol, its official journal said yesterday. The tender would offer roughly 653,381 hectoliters of wine alcohol stored in France, Greece, Italy and Spain. The deadline for bids was April 2, it said in its latest edition. «A tendering procedure for the sale of wine alcohol for exclusive use as bioethanol in the fuel sector should be organized… with a view to reducing Community stocks of wine alcohol and ensuring the continuity of supplies,» it said. France, Italy and Spain are the EU’s largest winemakers by volume and receive generous amounts of cash from Brussels to distill some of their excess wine, both table and quality, into industrial alcohol or biofuel. Last year, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel presented four broad policy options for overhauling the EU wine sector, with a formal reform proposal due in July. She has said publicly that she favors abolishing the existing system of «crisis distillation,» an emergency market tool used as a short-term measure to correct supply imbalances. Fischer Boel has repeatedly complained that the EU wine industry still depends too much on distillation to rid itself of unwanted «wine lakes» at taxpayers’ expense, saying a fundamental reform is needed to make EU wines more competitive.
