Italians maintain a sacred relationship with wine. Giovanni Marani wants them to fill their gas tanks with it. The chief engineer of the Caviro Distillery in Faenza, Italy, Marani is giving me a tour of the facility, yelling over the din of backhoes, conveyors, grinders, mixers, and steam kettles. "Eccole!" he says, using the Italian word for voilà, and proudly gestures to a pungent four-story mountain of fermenting grape skins. This pile of compost, he insists, is a new kind of renewable resource that will power factories and automobiles throughout Europe. "This is not common knowledge to most Italians," he says. "But this mound could become an important fuel source for the future."
For centuries, Italian distillers have used considerably smaller piles of marc – pressed grape skins, stems, and seeds left over from the wine-making process – to make grappa. But the combination of stratospheric gas prices – more than $7 per gallon in parts of Europe – and massive wine overproduction in recent years has innovators like Marani buzzing about the fuel of the future: wine ethanol.
Of course, grape skins, like all plant matter, contain carbohydrates that can be broken down into sugar and fermented. And enough ethyl alcohol can be distilled from the skins to make a decent source of biofuel or gas additive. After the annual pressing, Caviro alone procures 100,000 tons of marc from vineyards and farms across Italy.
From October until June, backhoes pick apart the pile and feed the mulch onto a series of conveyors, which carry it to a series of presses and kettles. The resulting solution is further fermented to make both grappa, a potable (to some, anyway) alcohol, at one end of the distillery and biofuel at the other. Caviro produces a relatively small amount of grappa compared with its nearly 793,000 gallons of ethyl alcohol. The potent fuel is sold throughout Europe.
But almost none of it in Italy. Italian regulations governing ethanol are a confusing patchwork, and the country's consumers have little incentive to try alternative fuel – if they could even find it. (Italian lawmakers are working with the EU to adopt guidelines for subsidizing sales of grape ethanol.) If that weren't enough to crush the grape-derived ethanol market in Italy, there's also a stigma: Few Italians want to imagine their sacred Sangiovese or Montepulciano grape going into something as unromantic as alternative fuel. "People think of wine as a precious drink," Marani says, shaking his head.
But that's not the worst of it for Italian wine purists. It's not just grape skins that are being turned into fuel. It's actual wine. In a move known as "crisis distillation," the European Union last year tried to stem the plummeting price of European wine by allowing most member states to sell surplus wine to distilleries at reduced prices. About 1.1 billion bottles' worth of wine from France, Spain, Italy, Greece, and Hungary ended up at facilities like Caviro. It was converted into a total of 95 million gallons of ethanol – enough to power the 36,277 cars in Sweden that run on a mix of bio-ethanol and petroleum for more than a year. That's still a tiny portion of the European biofuel market, which is expected to triple by 2008.
Touring the distillery, Marani reminisces about a recent trip to Sweden, where he saw cars and buses running on a fuel composed partly of Italian wine. "If you can believe it, the single biggest consumers of Italian wine are the Swedes," he says emphatically. Or, more precisely, Swedish cars.
– Bernhard Warner
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