Europe's wine industry faces sweeping changes over the next few years as producers are offered big cash rewards to dig up their vines and finally drain the EU's lakes of surplus wine.
Apart from fending off competition from New World wines by focusing more on quality than quantity, the idea is to divert subsidies to discourage unwanted surpluses that usually end up being distilled into industrial alcohol or biofuel.
In a blueprint for shaking up policy on wine, a sector last reformed in 1999, EU Agriculture Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel is keen to scrap or at least simplify many existing subsidies and curtail unnecessary production.
That won't go down well with some governments, particularly the main wine countries of southern Europe like France, Spain and Italy, which are also the world's top three producers.
"Our wines are famous all over the world. They are associated with centuries of tradition and expertise and are produced in some of the continent's most beautiful landscapes," Ms Fischer Boel told a news conference.
"Despite all our natural advantages, we are heading for a crisis," she said, adding that falling demand and rising New World sales meant Europe might soon become a net wine importer.
"We are producing too much wine for which there is no market. Stocks are already the equivalent of a year's production. The 'wine lake' is very much a reality," she said.
The EU is the world's largest producer, consumer, exporter and importer of wine. In recent years, it has lost part of its traditional export markets to cheaper wines from Australia, Chile and also the United States, and seen a surge in imports.
For many years, hefty production subsidies skewed the balance between EU wine supply and demand and led to huge surpluses that could not be easily sold.