Next to prohibition, the worst calamity that can happen to a wine economy is overproduction. Periods when there was too much wine have been a recurring bane of European viticultural history, for various reasons, bringing measures to curb the excess to the forefront of administrative ingenuity. Many will recall the European wine lake of the 1970s, when European Community producers were subsidised by quantity alone, under the terms of the Common Agricultural Policy. The lake was eventually drained by the desperate resort of “crisis distillation,” which saw much of it converted to industrial alcohol. Some was famously transmogrified into engine fuel, and sent to Brazil to be sold at gas stations.
In contrast to the sudden bonanza of a particularly productive vintage, a wine glut tends to happen gradually, behind the backs of growers and merchants until the cellars are so full that nobody knows what to do with it. No market, as basic economics informs us, can expand indefinitely, and even though selling off the surplus cheaply is the immediate recourse, sooner or later there will be a colossal unwanted reserve that nobody wants.
The first instance in history in which overproduction became a recognized problem arose in the first century of the Christian Era, when wine-growing came to be preferred to grain farming in many parts of the Roman Empire. In AD 92, the Emperor Domitian issued the only proclamation of his reign to cover the entire imperium, rather than one or other province of it. It banned the planting of any new vineyards, and—more radically still—ordered that half of existing vines outside the confines of Italy be pulled up.
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