The Prosecco hills are just one step away from UNESCO: ICOMOS is favorable, waiting for July 7th

The UN World Heritage Committee will hold their decisive meeting on July 7th in Baku, Azerbaijan, but the International Council of Monuments and Sites, the Unesco advisory body, seems to be in favor of the application of the Prosecco Hills of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene to become a UNESCO Heritage Cultural Landscape. Therefore, it would seem that soon the Italian wine drunk most the world over - which exports in 2019 registered a record increase of +25%, and are predicted to reach one billion euros at the end of the year, according to Coldiretti on the basis of Istat data relating to the first two months of the year - will succeed in entering the UNESCO register, after the negative outcome of last year’s procedure.
The reason that last year’s “verdict” has been overturned would be because the 300 page dossier was rewritten by a team of six experts, who in just a few months have carried out new investigations and have produced many original documents. “The previous dossier”, explained Mauro Agnoletti, scientific coordinator of the application dossier, “did not describe in full the beautiful Hills of Valdobbiadene, where since the Middle Ages the terraces formed by its grassy banks have created the historical form of viniculture. We therefore put wine-growing areas that do not have great landscape quality in second place. We also eliminated non-effective focuses on winemaking techniques and wine as a product”, Agnoletti specified, “that replicated the motives of other UNESCO applications, such as Champagne or Burgundy, of which the French are masters. We instead focused on the real added value that cannot be reproduced by Italy’s competitors, not only of Prosecco; that is, the landscape”.