Positive data from the USA and China, falling stocks: Italian wine is trying to get back on track

Prices, exports, stocks: the first signs of rebound for Italian wine, after more than a year of strong tension. This is recorded by the Observatory of Unione Italiana Vini (UIV), which analyzed the main market indicators of a sector that, due to closures, in 2020 lost a quarter of its business on the domestic market. As anticipated yesterday by WineNews, stocks as of April 30, 2021, are dropping considerably, with cellar stocks that, despite a richer harvest (+3.2%), are getting closer and closer to the quantities of the end of April 2020, at +1.5% (last month they were at +3.6%), with PDO wines even at -0.6% (whites at -1.8%).
On the export front, according to the data provided by customs, with the first re-openings, the loss in value of the previous months in the USA was mitigated - from -22% in January, to -15% in February and -9.7% in March -, mainly due to the rush to stock up for the beginning of 2020 in view of the carousel of additional duties, and Italian sparkling wines in the leading importing country restarted (+11%). Performance was good in the quarter in China, where a market chasm opened up due to the super-duties imposed on Australia: France took advantage of this, with a surge of +47.7%, but also Italy, which almost reached an increase of +17%. Finally, prices are on the rise, also because of the frost, with white wines rising by 20%, in a spiral that is increasing everywhere.
The Secretary General of the Unione Italiana Vini (UIV), Paolo Castelletti, explains that “the market dynamics seem to be going in the expected and desired direction, but this does not mean that companies, in order to recover from the 3 billion euros lost in 2020 and from about 500 million euros of substandard credits, must be accompanied in this first phase by adequate fiscal and financial instruments, which we expect in the upcoming Dl Sostegni bis. The evolution of the market - adds the Secretary UIV - will go hand in hand with the openings, and the sector today needs promotion and liquidity, not the destruction of its product. In the medium term, then, the game will be played on the yields of ordinary wines: UIV asks for a ceiling, in order to avoid overproduction”. Also because, according to a study of the Wine Observatory UIV, published in the last issue of “Il Corriere Vinicolo”, in 2025 the Italian vineyard will return to have 700,000 hectares, as in 2008, when the European Commission launched the CMO with the mechanism of explanting with premium.