Con más producción y menos consumo, los viticultores proponen bombas de vino en las gasolineras

Spain Stuck With Wine For Every Tub
MADRID (UP) – Wine went begging here at seven-and-a-half cents a bottle while worried authorities wondered how to build up consumption.

There’s already enough surplus wine, about 50,000,000 gallons of it, to fill every bath tub in Spain, and industry sources estimate the overflow might mount to 375,000,000 gallons, if there’s a bumper crop this year.

Where are the thirsts of yesteryear?
1. Spaniards have switched to beer or soft drinks, blaming the change on the increase in price since pre-war days which sent a litre of wine up from one peseta (2½ cents) to three pesetas (7½ cents).
2. Wine production is at flood-tide. The 1948-1953 average of 400,000,000 gallons annually jumped to 850,000,000 gallons in 1953 and is still rising in 1954.

Vintners, resting on the wine-drinking tradition, never tried to raise the thirst of their customers until they saw the market running dry this year. Now they have turned to publicity in a big way.

Advertising points out that Napoleon’s armies stuck to wine and missed all sorts of afflictions plaguing the local populations on their lines of march. Like army uniforms, «wine warms you in winter, cools you in summer,» is a slogan.

In Barcelona, there is talk of selling wine from gasoline-type pumps at wayside filling stations…