Sonoma and Napa wine glut has been well documented.
Of Wine, Hand Sanitizer and Heartbreak
New York Times
Between the coronavirus and the Trump tariffs, the French wine market has collapsed. So winemakers are — sadly — sending their excess product off to another life as hand sanitizer.
HUNAWIHR, France — The tanker-truck pulled up and it was time to let it go. The decision to send the wine to the distillery had been made weeks ago. It still hurt. Soon the wine would be sanitizing hand gel.
“We’ve got to load it up now,” said Jérôme Mader, a 38-year-old winemaker, muttering to himself. “OK, I am not even going to think about it anymore,” he said quietly. “It’s over.”
Head down, he dragged the hoses out through his shed, affixed them to the truck’s valves with the help of the driver, walked up to his cool cellar, and turned on the pumps. The wine — good Alsace white wine, drinkable wine — coursed through the hoses and into the truck’s belly. Its fate didn’t bear thinking about.
Across the emerald Alsace wine country, now carpeted in deep-green vines — and across France’s other wine regions as well — thousands of winemakers, famous and obscure, are facing similar moments of heartbreak.
The economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus, combined with the Trump administration’s 25 percent tax on French wines in the trade war dispute with Europe, has collapsed the wine market.
Mr. Mader, whose high-quality Rieslings and Gewürztraminers are sent to fancy restaurants and shops on both sides of the Atlantic, has lost half his sales since December.
“Covid is a catastrophe for us,” he said.
And so some of the succulent and subtle white wine for which this region is famous, nurtured on the stony, sunbathed Alsace slopes, will wind up as hand sanitizer.
Like other winemakers, Mr. Mader has no room in his cellar to stock unsold wine. “We can’t keep stocking what we haven’t sold,” he said.
The precocious 2020 harvest, blessed by abundant sunshine, is barely a month away. The wine vats must be emptied for the new production. The distillery, for modest compensation, is the only option.
The driver from the distillery had been making the rounds of winemakers all morning. “Some of them are taking this quite badly, because this wine has commercial value,” the driver, Lucas Neret, noted dryly.
“We’re producing more than we can sell,” said Thibaut Specht, a winemaker in nearby Mittelwihr. “We have no choice.”
Marion Borès’s family business, Domaine Borès, in Reichsfeld, is sending 30 percent of its production — 19,000 liters. “It’s like you are saying goodbye to somebody who is very dear to you,” she said.
“This is not exactly the destination we had in mind, when we made this wine,” the 27-year-old winemaker added.
The old wine is ending up in the towering steel silos of the nearby Romann distillery, where it will be boiled down to alcohol.
In Alsace alone, over six million liters of wine, or about 1.5 million gallons, will end up like this. Mr. Mader is sending 15 percent of his production, wine he calls “Edelzwicker,” or “noble blend” in Alsatian dialect. Usually sold wholesale, “it’s still pretty good,” Mr. Mader said.
At the distillery, the odor of boiled-down wine, like the essence of a rich beef burgundy sauce, hung heavy over the establishment on a warm morning this week.
“We’re continuously distilling,” said Erwin Brouard, the company’s director. “It’s something that’s very sad for the winemakers. Their stocks are too big. They’ve got to make space. And the harvest is early this year.”
The French government, anxious to protect its precious wine heritage, is subsidizing the operation, compensating the some 5,000 winemakers who have signed up so far at a fraction of the wine’s value, less than $1 per liter, in what the government calls Crisis Distillation.
“My cellar is bursting, ”said Guillaume Klauss, who owns a nearby winery. “If I don’t send it off, I don’t eat. Clearly this is tearing me up. It’s three years of work, and we’re not even paid properly.”