if the boffins can do something useful with all the warehoused unsellable wine it might help in various ways.

Don't need to be too much of a boffin to know how to distill wine into straight ethanol, we've been doing it for about 3000 years as a species.

The question is not "how" we turn red wine into pure ethanol that a petrol car can run, the question is "is it cost effective".

Given even the cheapest red wine is currently going for a similar price to petrol, undistilled, they're going to need to take a massive haircut on the cost if there is going to be ethanol produced that is cheaper than petrol per litre when you're only going to get about 10% ethanol per litre.

Agriculture and horticulture use massive amounts of fossil fuels. Not just to run equipment that could be electrified at massive cost but chemicals that use them as feedstock . Ethanol is an agricultural subsidy, not a green fuel and not a path to energy independence.

Betteridge’s Law invocation.

One for you, one for me

"one for me one for you" - me to my car while waiting to pick up my kids from school

Curious if any smell would make it through production, like the bio diesel cars that make you crave fish & chips

Solar is orders of magnitude more efficient than bio ethanol.

Grapes are a terrible choice for biofuels.

Even if the wine is warehoused and excess it’s dubious.

It's kind of wasteful to use good agriculture land to produce fuel, but if there is a surplus of wine is better to put it to good use. They'll have to distill it to a much higher percentage of ethanol to be useful as fuel though, it won't be drinkable anymore at that point. The residue might even be able to be fermented to produce methanol.

It makes about as much sense as growing a bunch of corn with heavy fertilization just to ferment it to ethanol. Which is to say, not at all.

The issue is rich people and infrastructure owners who cannot see adapting to new environments. They need people to continue to think in 1800’s mindsets, that a car needs a refueling station, so they can sell fuel, food, water, etc. then you have delivery companies for fuel, chip distributors, etc. if people just plug their cars in at home, they eliminate tens of millions of jobs that they do not want to try and figure out how to re-employ those people.

No , that's incredibly unlikely. A standard 5 oz glass of wine contains about 120 to 130 kcal. In contrast, the same volume of standard gasoline packs roughly 10,000 kcal.

Aw shit this just reminds me of the slightly offensive Australian Table Wine by Monty Python...

UB40 starts playing

Some strong symbolism here. Something made for no purpose other than pleasure, with a long history of bringing people together, forming culture, celebrating happiness, etc. Then pour it into your car to destroy it just to get to work. The machine is hungry...

The picture reminds me of this scene from Back to the Future Part III

https://youtu.be/G_b06FHH6PA

Like one of the other comments said though, if it’s done well it could work.

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.

If you consider that:

• cost of distilling bakes in the thermodynamic and energy costs of raising the temperatures of the wine to separate the alcohol
• the price for the pure alcohol is fungible with the market price of any other liquid fuel or alcohol on a per-energy equivalence

This seems like it's a net energy negative process where the total amount of energy available to the society drops where you do this. This is exactly why it loses money.

Basically:

• you buy some energy some place
• wine producers take product they already made that has no market value and use the energy input to make something they can sell, using up that original energy
• the energy coming out is lower than what you started with in step 1, but you sell the energy for less money
• this loses energy AND money, but the government subsidies make the money side not a problem

This cuts wine makers in on the deal in a way where the market makes this feasible despite the underlying thermodynamic losses.

NOTE: the grapes and wine that were originally grown, the harvesting, bottling etc also have thermodynamic and material costs that are totally external to this analysis. The farm itself bought fuel when it made the wine, that's all not ibcluddd into the ethanol calculus. When you consider the total investment with a wider boundary you can start to cost many additional resources like time, water, wages, insurance, financial interest and on and on.

It has been my fuel for many years now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwgkHr9F1vw

There isn't actually a surplus of red wine. Almost no red grapes were crushed this year.