Wine lake

The wine lake refers to the continuing supply surplus of wine (supply glut) produced in the European Union. A major contributor to that glut is the Languedoc-Roussillon, which produces over one-third of the grapes grown in France. In 2007 it was reported that for the previous several vintages, European countries had been producing 1.7 billion more bottles of wine than they sell. Hundreds of millions of bottles of wine are turned into industrial alcohol every year, a practice that is sometimes described as "emergency distillation".