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Issue 674 - March 25th - 29th 2024 - Expressly created for 4722 wine lovers, professionals and opinion leaders from all over the world | |
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| | | It was not an easy year for wine, but Italy as a whole held up, closing 2023 over €5.1 billion on the export front for packaged PDO wines (+0.3% on the previous year), while volumes, at 1.3 million hectoliters, dropped -3.8 % on 2022. Italy maintains second place in Europe, after France and before Spain. Data emerging from Nomisma Wine Monitor’s Report on the export of Italian PDO wines in 2023. On the value front, the average export price grows (4.99 euros per liter, +4.3% over 2022). Prosecco is the most exported Italian wine in the world, worth 1.7 billion euros. | |
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| | In 2004, the world’s top wine consumption market was France, with more than 33 million hectoliters; 20 years later, it is the United States that takes the top step on the podium, with 34.3 million hectoliters of wine consumed. In addition, Spain drops out of the top 5 and the United Kingdom enters. In the same period, the U.S. more than doubles the value of imported wine (from 2.7 to 6.2 billion euros), even higher growth in Canada (+152%). On the opposite front, maintaining world leadership, France doubles the value of exports, but best of all (among the top 5) does Italy: +174%. Against this trend is Australia: -22%. The wind has changed, even in Italy, and red wines in particular have been the losers: if 20 years ago they accounted for 54% of Italian production and 45% of national consumption, today they have dropped below 40%, both in terms of production and consumption (in a context where, at a total level, they have gone from 48.3 to 37 liters per capita). Sparkling wines, on the other hand, have exploded: the category’s weight in total domestic consumption has doubled, from 7% to 14%. These are the figures emerging from the research, carried out by Nomisma’s Wine Monitor for the Istituto Grandi Marchi, in the 20th year since the organization, which groups 18 wine families, among the most important production realities in Italy, united by the desire to divulge the culture, traditions and set of ethical and sustainable values that make up the excellence of made-in-Italy wine, was founded in 2004. The report, presented in Rome (Palazzo Grazioli), by Denis Pantini (Nomisma Wine Monitor) and the president of the Istituto Grandi Marchi, Piero Mastroberardino, analyzes the performance of Italian fine wines in international markets. A parallel story to that of the Institute, useful to observe the megatrends, in perception and buying behavior, that have written the history of Italian premium wines in world markets. A look back 20 years in global wine consumption first shows a higher level of 6 million hectoliters compared to 232 today. This is not a big difference (-2.5%), but what has changed the most is the “geography” of consumption. Consumption is shifting and, as a result, imports are increasing, and new competitors are appearing on the global scene. | |
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| | He had announced it several times, including at the microphones of WineNews, that, in the run-up to Vinitaly 2024, he would bring all international wine policy to Italy’s court, Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida. And so it will be, as the International Wine Conference (“Wine Ministerial Meeting”), organized together with the International Organization of Vine and Wine, led by Professor Luigi Moio, will be staged between Brescia, in Franciacorta, and Verona, April 11-13. Details will be announced on April 4 from the Cavour Room of the Ministry of Agriculture. The International Wine Conference, explains a note from the Ministry, was organized in collaboration with the OIV for the Centenary of the Foundation of the International Organization of Vine and Wine: 28 wine-producing nations will be present. | |
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| | | It is a fact that climate change is also impacting viticulture and wine production more and more every year. And there are numerous studies that predict that the areas where wine will be produced in the near future will also change, and will be different from those of today: some destined to disappear, others to be added, especially further north and where it is colder (or less hot), and others to change profoundly in vine training methods and grape varieties. In particular, according to the study “Climate change impacts & adaptations of wine production”, published in the renowned and authoritative scientific journal “Nature”, and led by the Université of Bordeaux, together with the University of Palermo and the Université de Bourgogne in Dijon, it emerges that, due to the climate that will change the composition and quality of wine but also the economic costs of management and consequently the environmental and economic sustainability of farms, between 50% and 70% of today’s viticultural areas have a risk, ranging from moderate to high, of becoming unsuitable for grape production, depending on the global warming framework, especially in the Mediterranean area, but not only. New suitable areas could instead emerge at higher latitudes and altitudes. | |
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| | | A decisive moment for work in the vineyard is pruning, to which the “Italian Pruning Festival” contest, created by Simonit & Sirch Vine Master Pruners, was dedicated and landed in Tuscany in the vineyards of Agricola San Felice di Castelnuovo Berardenga in Chianti Classico (owned by Allianz Group). The “masters” of pruning participated, with Matteo Finezzo (Verona) elected Italy’s best vine pruner while the top team was that of the “Largoni Boys” (Marco Cecchetto, Nikolas Marson, Marco Gregoris) from Azienda Giorgio Cecchetto in Motta di Livenza. | |
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| | “Wine in the mountains is perhaps the crop that more than any other tells us what the earth that valley or place is made of. It is as if the grapes have this power to extract from the earth its smells, its substances, its minerals”. Words, to WineNews, from Paolo Cognetti, author of the book “The Eight Mountains”, which explains well the spirit of the new project of Nino Negri, a winery founded in 1897, now owned by Gruppo Italiano Vini (GIV), which has contributed in no small part to the international fame of Valtellina wines. And which, in addition to producing wines at high altitudes, now also wanted to put them in aging “at the summit”, in a new cellar created in the spaces of the Heaven 3000 refuge, to see if the mountains have peculiar effects on wine aging as well. | |
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| | Wine consumption also falls in large-scale distribution, which, with 756 million liters of wine and sparkling wine sold in 2023, remains the leading commercial channel: an overall drop of 3.3% in volume (2.8% for wines of origin) although with an increase in value (+ 2.5%). Among the most purchased wines in supermarkets and discount stores, Prosecco wins, ahead of Chianti, Lambrusco, Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and Vermentino. These are the anticipations of the “Circana for Vinitaly 2024” study.
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