VALORITALIA INSPECTED ONE BILLION DOC AND DOCG BOTTLES (75% OF QUALITY ITALIAN WINES). 215.000 OPINIONS ON DOC WINES IN 2011. DATIDOP.VALORITLIA.IT: ASSESSMENT AND DOC-DOCG BOTTLING COMPARISONS

183 denomination wines inspected (139 DOC and 44 DOCG) covering 75% of the Italian Doc-Docg production or about 163 thousand hectares (equal to 226.388 soccer fields lined up next to each other), for a total of 12.5 million quintals of grapes a year, almost 8 million hectoliters of bottled wine or more than 1 billion 0.75 liter bottles (an incredible number that would fill up 75 thousand Semi trucks, lined up from Turin to Taranto); almost 200 thousand opinions about wine in the first few months of 2011, 15 thousand inspection consults between vineyard and cellar with 345 “slight non conformities” and 636 “serious non conformities”.
These are the numbers from Valoritalia, the institute founded in 2009 in answer to the European norm on obligatory impartiality of the inspection system for verifying quality wines. “Compared to a year ago,” commented Luigino Disegna, President of Valoritalia that today in Rome presented the figures for the last 12 months, “the number of denominations we inspected rose from 160 to 183. This is a significant increase, which translated into practical terms means that tens of thousands of bottling and wine companies were inspected with Valoritalia’s method”.
Valoritalia also presented its website www.datidop.valoritalia.it, which offers the possibility to visualize in PDF format yearly data and download three-month tables and comparisons relative to verifications and bottling of each denomination. “It is a mountain of information,” said Ezio Pelissetti, managing director of Valoritalia, which represents an authentic patrimony for the producers and professionals in the industry. We are giving back to the producers and professionals the data of the Italian Denomination of Origin vineyard, the production and the trend over the years. It is a difficult but indispensable task, which improves and protects the status of one of the most important Made in Italy products.