France is going to buy up wine surpluses and have them converted into industrial alcohol. The country spends regarding 160 million euros on this, the Ministry of Agriculture announced this week. Industrial alcohol can be used in, for example, beauty products such as perfume.
The average Frenchman drank 130 liters of wine a year seventy years ago. Now that has dropped to 40 liters. Red wine in particular suffers from this. Last year, 15 percent less was sold in French supermarkets.
White wine and rosé fared better. Sales of this fell by 3 to 4 percent.
Especially in the region around Bordeaux, too much wine has been produced following a number of good summers. As a result, the storage was full and there was no room left for the results of the coming harvest.
Winegrowers want compensation
“We had 24 months worth of wine in our cellars,” says winemaker Didier Cousiney. The winegrowers from Bordeaux have already campaigned several times. They want compensation to plow part of their vineyards and use them for other purposes.
The compensation should be 10,000 euros per hectare. Otherwise, between 100,000 and 150,000 jobs will disappear in the region in the next ten years, they fear.
But instead, the government chooses to distill the stocks. The alcohol that remains can be used in the pharmaceutical industry and in making beauty products.
In 2020, the French government also bought leftover alcohol when the catering industry was forced to close due to the pandemic. Then the alcohol was used to make disinfectants to fight corona.