(NYTimes) - Amid wrangling over how much money the European Union spends at a time of grinding austerity across the Continent, Martin Ehrenhauser, an Austrian member of the European Parliament, lobbed a sobering question this summer at the union’s Brussels bureaucracy: How many bottles of booze does it have stocked in its wine cellars? The answer, which took four months to deliver, revealed a grand total of 42,789 bottles of red, white and sparkling wines, plus nearly 2,000 more of spirits in the cellars of the European Commission and the European Council, two main pillars of the 27-nation bloc.