“Vino Patrimonio Comune”: a database is born to guarantee the authenticity of Italian wine

Ensuring the authenticity of wine production, verifying in technical terms the typicality and correspondence with the territory of origin, and provide Italian wineries with a tool for self-control and greater awareness, also to guarantee the final consumer: this is the objective of “Vino Patrimonio Comune” (Wine Common Heritage), a project signed by Federvini and Alleanza delle Cooperative Italiane-Agroalimentare to offer companies a tool along the lines of the European isotopic database, which can be consulted only by the national control authorities of EU countries and not by private operators.
In the private sector, always on a European basis, some commercial brands have started projects of profiling the analytical characteristics of wines in order to protect mainly their own contractual interests. The projects, in this case, are however run by subjects different from wine producers. The lack of shared data and references about the database to which these private systems draw from, adds uncertainties about the surveys.
The project “Vino Patrimonio Comune” took its first steps with the harvest 2020, during which, thanks to the collaboration of companies and cooperatives, the first samples were taken by the University of Parma, scientific partner of the initiative. In this way it was possible to create the “Must-Wine Isotopic Database for the Harvest 2020”, made up of data related to the stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen of must and wine samples coming from various Italian locations. The database will be progressively implemented in order to have a more and more performing and complete tool.
“Value and authenticity: these are the two words we started from and these are the two aspects our project is looking at - explains Sandro Boscaini, president of Federvini - we are laying the first stone of a common house, which was created under the impulse of our associates, but whose door is now open to everyone. Our hope, indeed our invitation, is that other colleagues of ours may soon join the project, that more bodies and scientific organizations may join in order to work together for the valorization and protection of the authenticity of wine”.
“The objective of this important project is to achieve a higher level of knowledge of our territorial wine productions - underlines the Coordinator of the wine sector of the Agri-food Cooperatives Alliance, Luca Rigotti - a path that allows us to provide our members with a tool for self-control and greater awareness. We consider today’s signature as the starting point of an ambitious initiative and path, which we believe is necessary because it is able to contribute to the greater protection and valorization of wines on the markets2.