Wine lake

Wine lake is a cultural phrase referring to the phenomenon of perceived overproduction of wine in the European Union. The phenomenon first came in perception & persistence around the mid-1980s ^[1][2] and reemerged in the mid-2000s as a significant issue. The EU's Common Agricultural Policy contained a number of subsidies for wine producers, leading to a supply glut. This surplus forced an overhaul of EU farm policies.^[1][3]

In 2007 it was reported that for the previous several vintages, Europe had been producing 1.7 billion more bottles of wine than they sold.^[4] Hundreds of millions of bottles of wine had been turned into industrial alcohol every year, a practice that had sometimes been described as "emergency distillation"^[5] at a cost to taxpayers of €500 million per year.^[4] A major contributor was reported to be Languedoc-Roussillon wine production, which used one third of the grapes grown in France.

One of the proposed remedies to wine lake was Plan Bordeaux, an initiative introduced in 2005 by the French vintners association ONIVINS to reduce France's production and raise prices. Part of the plan was to uproot 17,000 hectares (42,000 acres) of the 124,000 ha (310,000 acres) of vineyards in Bordeaux. The proposed plan was met with some resistance.^[6]

In 2020, wine growers warned that the EU risked another massive surplus due to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic,^[1] particularly the restaurant closures. The growers called for additional subsidies to distill surplus wine.^[1] A large portion of the wine surplus was distilled into hand sanitizer.^[7]

In 2023, €200 million was again earmarked for conversion of surplus wine into industrial products.^[8]