THE EUROPEAN CMO FOR WINE HAS GONE INTO EFFECT AND ITALIAN WINE ORGANIZATIONS RESPONSD - ITALIAN WINE UNION (UIV): “IMPORTANT RESOURCES START ONLY IN 2013”. FEDERVINI: “THERE ARE STILL MANY RULES TO BE DEFINED”

The European Union’s new Common Market Organization (CMO) for wine has now gone into effect and some of Italy’s top wine organizations have made public their response to the new measures.

The reform is set to accompany a rapid restructuring of the sector through a package that will include a voluntary extirpation campaign for vineyards in order to sustain those producers who are no longer able to confront competition, as well as other interventions that have the goal of reinforcing the competitiveness of those who remain on the market.
Thanks to this new regime, Italy will be able to immediately count on an increase in financial resources that will grow from 190 to 251.3 million euros and then eventually reach 376.4 million.

Though the reform has now gone into effect, countries will have another year, until 2009, to apply all of the measures relative to geographic indications, labelling, and enological practices.



Italian Wine Union’s (UIV) response: “Important resources only by 2013”

Though the European CMO wine reform has now officially gone into effect, according to the general secretary of the Italian Wine Union, Paolo Castelletti, “not much will change until 2012 for the gradual elimination of measures linked to the enriching and distillation of sub-products. The true resources to support competitiveness and re-launch enterprises, will become important only in 2013”. Castelletti emphasized that, “there is worry for the absence of a central command at a ministerial level in order to reduce the risk of dispersion into thousands of diversions the 70% of funds that the regions, in a state-region conference, wanted to manage autonomously”.

Regardless, “a reform has arrived that looks towards the market but which suffers from negotiations conducted in Brussels without a large push on the competition front. We would have wanted more funds for promotion on foreign markets. For the most conspicuous resources the entrepreneurial world must wait until 2013”.

The response was negative, however, towards the measure that now allows table wines to indicate vintage and varietal on their labels because it could risk creating competition with the many IGT certified wines, as well as towards the lack of suppression of the use of sugar additions, which, in fact, favors producers from Northern Europe who profit this enological practice.
And even on the communications front, complained Castelletti, “resources become important (100 million euros) only at the end of the transitory period”.

Federvini’s response:
“There are still many rules to define”
The day the CMO wine reform went into effect, the president of Federvini (the Italian federation of industrialists, producers, exporters and importers of wine, acquavite, liquors, syrups, vinegars, etc.), Lamberto Vallarino Gancia, pointed out how, “Federvini has supported the changes from the first proposal made by the European commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel”. But the president also noted that, “there are still many rules to be defined”. Labelling, for example, is an element of discussion that could change the pyramid of DOCG-DOC-IGT and table wine quality.

“But it becomes very important for Italy” – observed Gancia – “not to lose that which is good in the old reform: valorization of territory, tutelage of denominations, distinctiveness of autochthonous varietals… It will become ever more important to inform customers in order to allow for more aware and qualitative choices. With the awareness that we are no longer the only players but that there is a new world, emerging on the market with enological practices and different rules, who often have the commercial force of being owners of European wineries, with all of the know-how that follows”.