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 difference is that for spirits sold to consumers, flavour matters. For biofuels, it doesn't – the aeroplane doesn't care what [the fuel] tastes like."
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