Australian Wine Industry Explores Using Red Wine Surplus as Biofuel

Using red wine as motor fuel could bring new meaning to the term "drink driving".

Australia's wine industry is investigating whether its current 263-million-litre glut of wine would be better used as biofuel to power cars, trucks or even aircraft.

Australian Grape and Wine chief executive Lee McLean said the vast majority of the oversupply was red wine and it made sense to consider alternative uses for the surplus product.

"We've certainly got plenty of red wine in storage in Australia at the moment," he said.

"With the current fuel situation, it seems sensible to at least explore the economics, barriers and opportunities related to converting some of this into biofuel."

Filling the tank on fumes

Ethanol would be extracted from the wine through distillation, with 263 million litres of wine expected to produce about 30 million litres of ethanol.

University of Adelaide plant science professor Rachel Burton said the ethanol in wine was not fundamentally different to the ethanol found in E10 petrol.

"The difference is in purification," Professor Burton said.

"If you wanted to isolate the bioethanol, you would do that through distillation, which is the same process used to make spirits."

Professor Burton said while there would be logistics to work out, the theory behind the idea had merit.

"Since the wine is already fermented, the ethanol is sitting there in the product already," she said.

"Distillation simply involves applying heat to separate out the alcohol. It's essentially the same process used to make whiskey or tequila.

The world drinking less

Mr McLean said the amount of wine consumed globally in 2025 had dropped to 1961 levels, when the world population was 40 per cent of its current size.

"We're dealing with a significant oversupply, not just of wine but also in vineyard capacity," he said.

"It's a perfect storm for grape growers and wine makers, with grape prices in many areas sitting at about half the cost of production."

Wine consultant Leon Deans said distillation could be a viable option to remove the oversupply, but may require government support because the cost of distilling the wine could be higher than the revenue from the ethanol.

"Broadly speaking, you'd probably need something in the order of about 15 cents per litre of wine to cover the gap," Mr Deans said.

"And that assumes we would still recover some value from converting it into a final product such as pharmaceutical-grade alcohol or fuel-grade ethanol."

Mr Deans said removing the oversupply would help the industry restructure.

"China was seen as the great saviour seven to 10 years ago, but now that market has stabilised and ended up being much smaller than many had hoped," he said.

"Over the past 20 to 25 years of imbalance between supply and demand, many growers have had to sell their water entitlements just to survive.

'That makes exiting difficult because there isn't necessarily a cash-positive pathway out."