There are currently several places in the world that are suffering catastrophic flooding – Greece and Libya chief among them. It’s no laughing matter, with many deaths and huge amounts of property damage. Here is Massachusetts there is less severe, but nonetheless still catastrophic flooding in sand around the town of Leominster, which is still largely closed today.
But one less serious note concerns a flood of red wine in the town of Sao Laurenco in Portugal, where two storage tanks burst and sent over half a million gallons of red wine (said to be enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool) down the streets. AFAIK, there were no casualties.
That won’t match 2.3 million gallons of molasses that flooded Boston in terms of damage, but given the choice I’d prefer a flood of port wine. Given a choice I’d prefer the wine to the water in my basement right now.
To be honest, while we make jokes about it, bet it would absolutely be serious if it were your home that is affected. A basement full of wine is a bad day and every bit as bad as river water or sea water. Maybe worse?. Stinky nasty stuff real quick. Probably draws lots of insects and other vermin. The video I saw, it was pretty much contained to the streets but I wonder if a lot of it ended up in homes or businesses. I thought wineries, breweries, distilleries and similar would be required to have some sort of containment measures to prevent this kind of thing.
No idea if this is paywalled – I didn’t hit one, FWIW – but here’s a longer article.
Sunday’s wine wave began at Destilaria Levira, a company that specializes in transforming wine into a slew of products, including gin, cleaning supplies and food oils. Though authorities are still investigating what caused the tanks to burst, the company said the wine they carried was essentially going to be destroyed — or distilled into raw alcohol — as part of the Portuguese government’s attempts to address a brewing wine crisis.
The nation with the world’s highest wine consumption per capita is among the European countries grappling with a massive surplus of wine this year. The combination of rising production costs and an ever-increasing range of alcoholic drink options has resulted in plummeting demand for wine in countries such as France, Spain and Italy.
The wine in São Lourenço do Bairro, however, wound up in a wastewater treatment plant after the Anadia Volunteer Fire Brigade managed to reroute the liquid, JN reported.
The episode in Portugal isn’t the first time large amounts of wine have spilled. In 2020, the Russian River in California’s Sonoma County was tainted red after a 97,000-gallon winery tank burst open. That same year, a 13,000-gallon tank broke at a Spanish winery, leaving a flood of red wine gushing down like a breached dam.
Edited to add a link to the original Portuguese article (“JN reported”).
I couldn’t help but think of Boston’s molasses flood, living in the Boston area and having read Dark Tide. But that was a real disaster that took lives and did serious property damage. The idea of a molasses flood sounds funny, but molasses, unlike sloths and giant snails, can move pretty damned fast under the right circumstances, and getting caught in it was no joke.
The wine flood, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have caused casualties or serious damage. And the company has agreed to cover any damages.
We drink a ton of French wine in St Martin (the French side). We pay a fraction of what we would pay in the US. If for some reason we’d prefer a California wine it would be very expensive.
Likewise, I drink Heineken on the Dutch side. It is very cheap. There is, however, a “Steelers Bar” where you can buy Iron City Beer at a crazy inflated price (and people do).
I was just reading about that molasses flood a couple weeks ago. I knew about it, and guessed (correctly) that the tanks probably weren’t even suitable to hold water, let alone a heavy substance like molasses, but the tanks leaked even beforehand and children in the neighborhood would peel dried molasses off the tank, in the areas where it oozed out, and ate it.
I don’t understand this concept of too much wine !