A plan to turn French wine into industrial alcohol

According to the French Ministry of Agriculture, the country’s long-growing unused wine production is now so high that the government plans to convert it into industrial alcohol used for the industrial production of pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

France is the world’s second largest producer of wine after Italy, and the French nation is traditionally regarded as a wine-loving nation.

France is one of the few countries in Europe, where there are countless vineyards spread over huge areas. The varieties of wine produced in the southwest French region of Bordeaux are particularly well known and the region also has a lot of wine production.

Grape growers and winemakers in Bordeaux say their overall yields remain high, and the long-standing trend among French consumers to buy relatively cheap wines for their own consumption. As a result, their underground wine cellars are so full that no more wine can be stored there.

In France, such unsold stocks of wine have become so large that they have left no room in the wine cellars to even store the wine produced after the next season’s harvest.

In France, both the volume and the value of such wine reserves are so high that according to the country’s Ministry of Agriculture in Paris, it will spend 160 million euros or about 1470 million dollars on the production of industrial alcohol from this wine again through chemical process. will

One of the aspects of this project is that it will be possible to use only a part of the unused production of French wine. will not be forced to dispose of it somehow. Didier Cuzini, a Bordeaux winemaker, said his company’s cellars alone contain enough wine, equivalent to two years’ worth of production.

The French government had earlier advised farmers to start destroying grape vines. On this, like other regions of the country, the agricultural unions of Bordeaux region had also started protests against the government.

These farmers said that they should destroy their crops, but they also want financial compensation from the government as compensation. The government’s advice was to reduce the production of grapes and the affected farmers to start using their land for other crops as well.

For this process, at least 15 thousand hectares of grape crops will have to be destroyed. This area is equal to the total area of ​​21 thousand football fields. But for this process, the farmers demand that the government should pay them 10,000 Euros per hectare.

The French government last funded the business process of converting unsold domestic wine production into industrial alcohol in 2020. The sector was then hit hard by the global coronavirus pandemic as hotels, restaurants and wine bars remained closed as a result of the lockdown, and wine exports were reduced.

In the current situation, France’s National Interprofessional Wine Commission has said that about five million workers work in the French wine industry, and if the government does not take effective measures to improve the situation, in the next decade, one to one and a half million workers will be employed. The employment of lakhs of workers will be at risk.

According to the French Wine Production Association, sales of red wine alone in domestic supermarkets fell by 15 percent last year. Apart from this, a clear trend of continuous decline was observed in the sales of white wine and rosé wine.

According to expert analysts, 70 years ago in France, an average citizen drank an average of 130 liters of wine a year. Today, however, this tendency to drink wine has reduced to an average of 40 liters per person per year.