That Unsold Bottle of Merlot Is Probably Winding up in Your Gas Tank

by John Capone (Quartz Media) ... It’s where the dregs of every vodka still and every 9-year-old barrel-aged small batch bourbon expire. It’s where all the watery beer that didn’t end up at frat parties does its final keg stand. And it’s the fate that awaits the wine Robert Parker spits and finds not up to snuff, and where cases upon cases of merlot likely were sent after the pinot-pocalypse that was Sideways.

But for some unlucky vintages, it’s a quiet drive more than 400 miles south down the coast of California, to Parallel Products, where, in a facility surrounded by scrub brush, scrap heaps and festering waste ponds, a bottle of fermented grape juice can be dumped into modified stills and converted into fuel-grade ethanol.

This is the home of a company that might not manage the trick of turning water into wine, but turns wine into fuel-grade ethanol on a large scale.

It is one of two ethanol recovery facilities operated by 30-year-old Parallel Products and where it turns the West Coast’s distillery waste and unsellable (or “distressed,” in industry parlance) wine, as well as beer and corn syrup-rich soft drinks into fuel. A similar company, MXI Environmental, took large shipments of Four Loko, the banned alcoholic energy drink, at its Virginia facility a few years ago.

These companies portray themselves as greenwashing saviors producing “waste-derived renewable fuels.”

Parallel modified and added to the existing fermentation tanks and stills on the property, which dates back to the 1800s as a winery. It’s now fitted with the means for destroying the products it once created.

The main products destroyed at Parallel are either waste from the distilling process (commonly known as the “heads” and “tails” of each batch—this is the part you throw away unless you want to go blind), or “distressed surplus” beverages. READ MORE