Residents of a village Portugal On Sunday morning, the 10th, an unusual scenario awoke: the roads were impassable and filled with a violent flow of nearly 600,000 gallons of water red wine. After two tanks at a local distillery burst, the drink spilled so far across the streets of São Lourenço do Bairro in Anadia that it could fill an Olympicsized swimming pool raising fears among local officials about possible environmental damage.
Although wine flooded the streets of the town of about 2,200 residents for most of the day, firefighters managed to divert the liquid before it reached the nearby Cértima River, which feeds the city’s largest freshwater lake in Portugal and includes a network of wetlands and Reed areas supported and swamp habitats. No one was injured in the booze deluge, but city authorities told local broadcaster JN that they were still assessing possible damage to buildings or structures.
Sunday’s wine tour began at Destilaria Levira, a company that specializes in processing wine into a range of products such as gin, cleaning products and cooking oils. Although authorities are still investigating what led to the tanks bursting, the company said that wine would essentially be destroyed or distilled into raw alcohol as part of the Portuguese government’s attempts to resolve the beer wine crisis.
The country with the world’s highest per capita wine consumption is among European countries facing a massive wine glut this year. The combination of rising production costs and an everincreasing supply of alcoholic beverages has led to a sharp decline in demand for wine in places like… France, Spain It is Italy.
In Portugal, the European Commission It is estimated that wine consumption has fallen by 34% this year, particularly red and rosé wines prompted the country’s Ministry of Agriculture to invest 20 million euros in wine distillation. Through this emergency measure, wines with a Protected Designation of Origin or Protected Geographical Indication meaning a product comes from a specific region and has an officially recognized reputation will now be specifically selected for new use in order to stabilize the market.
However, the wine in São Lourenço do Bairro ended up in a sewage treatment plant after volunteer firefighters from Anadia managed to drain the liquid, JN reported. On Monday 12, Destilaria Levira thanked the government bodies that “have helped us in these most difficult times,” adding that the company “is making every effort so that wineries and producers who have worked with us over the years benefit from this “Unfortunate incident.”
Videos from the Rio de Vinho, which the municipality of Anadia said had invaded at least one residential basement, spread quickly on social media, where netizens compared it to “a miracle” and argued that the worst part of the flooding perhaps the amount of wine that no one drank.
The incident in Portugal is not the first in which large amounts of wine have been spilled. In 2020, the Russian River in Sonoma County, California (USA) turned red after a 97,000 gallon basement tank was opened. That same year, a 13,000gallon tank burst at a Spanish winery, leaving a torrent of red wine pouring out like a broken dam./Washington Post.