The weekly review of news on Italian wine for the Chinese market!
The most important moment of the year for the world of wine has opened, that of the grape harvest. It is still very early to start talking concretely about qualitative estimates for the 2021 harvest. Which, however, is slowly gaining ground, from the North to the South of Italy, with the first bunches already cut for some time in Sicily, for example, the harvest in progress in Franciacorta, and some rows of early varieties harvested also in the Bolgherese area, in Tuscany, as well as in other regions. The president of the Chianti Wine Consortium, Giovanni Busi, declared that “the 2021 production of Chianti wine will be reduced, due to the spring frost. But the quality of the grapes is excellent. And we expect a wine that can enter the ranks of the best vintages “. Less quantity but good quality is also, in summary, the forecast in the land of Prosecco Doc, the largest sparkling wine denomination in the Belpaese, as explained a few days ago by Andrea Battistella of the Prosecco Doc Consortium. The 2021 harvest in Soave, one of the most important Bianchisti territories, also promises very well. As the Consortium, led by Sandro Gini explains, “the data from the first samplings give more than satisfactory results.” But, in the meantime, there are also those who, with the grapes still far from being ready for harvest, look to the future by sending a clear message to the supply chain, as done by the Consortium for the protection of Valpolicella wines, underlining once more how also in a rich territory, where wine, Amarone in the lead, annually generates a turnover of 600 million euros, we must think together, with a view to ever greater quality and remuneration, rather than on further growth quantitative.
Let’s move on to the latest data on Italian wine increasingly loved in the world. As reported by the Vinitaly-Nomisma Wine Monitor Observatory, reopening and “revenge spending lead to a new record for the sales of Italian wine among the top 12 foreign buyer countries in the first half of 2021, with imports up by +7. 1% on the same period in 2020, but also + 6.8% on 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic broke out. The results are above average especially in China (+ 36.8%), Germany (+ 9.3%) and Russia (+ 29.4%).
We close with a new niche of wines that is conquering many consumers: we are talking about the Under Water Wines, the wines that are aged under water. Not a novelty, but still a dot in the wine universe, made up of 36 companies all over the world, and a production that does not exceed 200,000 bottles. The novelty is that in Italy a startup has been born that makes underwater refinement its core business, or “Jamin”, a start-up born in Portofino, which has approached the topic, of an exquisitely enological nature, in a scientific and analytical way, together at the University of Florence.
