Article: Troubles Facing European Wines
Submitted By: John Fratelli - Sommelier
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European winemakers are facing serious economic problems, with falling domestic consumption, excess production and popularity of New World wines. For example, French wines are being squeezed on foreign markets by the so-called "new age" wines, made in South Africa, Australia, Chile and the US. As a result, exports of wines from the Bordeaux and Burgundy regions were down about 8 per cent in 2003. The European Commission says that without reform, unwanted wine would account for 15% of total annual production by 2011.

So far, individual governments efforts to curb output and to make wine more attractive to foreign buyers have proved largely unsuccessful. For example, about 300 million litres of French and Italian wine is being turned into ethanol or surgical spirit this year, at a cost of 500m euros to taxpayers. However, the European Commision in Brussels has suggested a few options to emerge from the crisis:

• The main suggestion calls for more than 10% of Europe's vineyards to be pulled down by 2011 on a voluntary basis and the land put to alternative use. Bordeaux has already decided to destroy some of their vines and commercialize only 5 million hectoliters, hoping to force prices up.
  
  
• One suggestion involves the subtle changes to techniques governing winemaking, such as the permitted levels of sugar and alcohol.
  
  
• Another, more viable suggestion, is to make European wine more recognisable to consumers, labelling could be altered to allow greater prominence for familiar grape types - such as Chardonnay - rather than geographical origin. Again, French winemakers have already embarked on a political and media campaign to change the status of their product.

In June 2006, the European Commission announced that up to 510 million litres of this year's surplus wine will be made into bioethanol that can only be used as biofuel or industrial alcohol.

French winemakers have been given a quota of 150m hectolitres of table wine and 150m of quality wine, while Italians can sell 250m of quality and 10m litres of table wine for what the EU calls "crisis distillation."

The EU will pay around 130m euros for this year's surplus wine. Last year, more than 180m euros of EU cash went to pay for the distillation of wine for which buyers could not be found.

Turning quality wine into bioethanol may not be the cheapest way of producing biofuel, but it makes use of some of the excess wine that would otherwise go to waste.