600.000 hectoliter. Dat is heeel veeel.
En dat gaat de EU opkopen. 250.000 hl uit Italie, 200.000 uit Frankrijk en 150.000 uit Spanje, 50.000 uit Griekenland en 40.000 uit Portugal.
De EU heeft vandaag een tender uitgeschreven. Wie biedt het meest op deze lot… En by the way, je MOET er bioethanol van maken.
BRUSSELS – The European Union has opened tenders to sell off unwanted wine lakes in five countries to produce bioethanol, its Official Journal said today.
The tenders would offer 693 380,74 hectolitres of wine held in France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain to companies ready to put to “exclusive use as bioethanol in the fuel sector”.
Of this, 250 000 hectolitres was held in Italy, France had 200 000 hectolitres and Spain 150 000. The balance of 53 380,74 hectolitres was stored in Greece, with a further 40 000 hectolitres in Portugal. The deadline for bids is October 23.
After any sales had been concluded, the national intervention agency in the country concerned would check that the wine had been transformed into bioethanol, the Journal said.
“A tendering procedure for the sale of wine alcohol for exclusive use as bioethanol in the fuel sector in the Community should be organised … with a view to reducing Community stocks of wine alcohol,” the Journal said.
France, Italy and Spain are the EU’s three largest winemakers by volume. Last year they received more than €180m in EU cash to distill some of their excess wine, both table and quality, into industrial alcohol or biofuel.
Earlier this year, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel presented four broad policy options for reforming the wine sector, the world’s most important by far.
But she has said publicly that she favours 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 the taxpayers’ expense, saying that a fundamental reform is needed to make EU wines more competitive.
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