What To Do With 4 Billion Bottles of Wine?

The phrases “piss up” and "in a brewery” come instantly to mind.

The European Commission is convening an emergency wine summit to tackle the European Union's surplus of four billion bottles, which swallows up €1.2 billion to €1.6 billion (£810 million to £1 billion) of taxpayers' money each year.

How anyone can have a problem with too much wine is difficult to understand. But the issue is that subsidies have created incentives for producers to make wine that even students wouldn’t drink.

The growing popularity of "new world" wine is another blow to European growers when consumption is falling in most of the EU, except Britain. Yet Union farmers seem determined to produce poor-quality wine.

So apart from the obvious and logical answer, stop subsidies, what is a Eurocrat to do? How about sending a few cases of the stuff to all of the unmarried or married but currently childless couples in the EU. That way we get rid of the stuff and hopefully partly solve the demographic problem at the same time.