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Does Prince Charles’ Aston Martin run on cheese and wine?

Answer: Technically, yes.

Two glasses of white wine and a wooden plate with cheese and nuts served outside at sunset.
Shutterstock/Slava Zolotko
In a very British move, it turns out Prince Charles doesn’t put good old-fashioned petrol in his 1970 Aston Martin. No, he had it outfitted to run on something much classier: cheese and wine.

To be clear, the prince isn’t just putting bottles of vintage wine and wedges of cheese into the gas tank. Rather, what does go into it is a biofuel known as E85, which is made from ethanol combined with a little bit of gasoline. This is where the wine and cheese come in, as the byproducts from “surplus English white wine and whey from the cheese process” are what make up the ethanol.

According to Gizmodo, this retrofit is nothing new: Charles has been driving it this way for decades. In an effort to combat climate change, something that the prince has long been a strong proponent of, he asked Aston Martin to find a way to get the vintage car to run on biofuel. In an interview in 2018, he reportedly said that while the company was hesitant at first, “now they admit that it runs better and is more powerful on that fuel than it is on petrol.”