(1)

Under Article 27(3) of Council Regulation (EC) No 1493/1999 of 17 May 1999 on the common organisation of the market in wine (1), any natural or legal person, or group of persons having made wine is required to deliver for distillation all the by-products of that winemaking. Since the accession of Romania to the Community on 1 January 2007, that requirement also applies to wine producers in that Member State although the practice is not traditional in Romania.

(2)

Compliance with this requirement presumes that there are distilleries ready to carry out distillation with the support of Community financial assistance. While such distilleries have developed in those Member States of the Community as constituted at 31 December 2006, in which this requirement has existed for several years, as yet no such industrial infrastructure for distillation exists in Romania.

(3)

The alternative way of dealing with by-products is to withdraw them under supervision, as practised in several Member States.

(4)

Given that distillation cannot be carried out at present for practical reasons, Romanian producers should be exempted from the distillation requirement for a specific period, and that requirement should be replaced by a requirement to withdraw the by-products under supervision in accordance with the conditions laid down in Articles 50 and 51 of Commission Regulation (EC) No 1623/2000 of 25 July 2000 laying down detailed rules for implementing Regulation (EC) No 1493/1999 on the common organisation of the market in wine with regard to market mechanisms (2).

(5)

The measures provided for in this Regulation are in accordance with the opinion of the Management Committee for Wine,