The “Milano Wine Week” goes live, with tastings, presentations, and debates

Overcoming the crisis of the expensive energy and inflation, defending oneself from attacks from the neo-prohibitionist tenor that come incessantly in Europe, rationalizing the management of the Denominations of Origin, 526 the Italian ones, witness of the great richness, but also of complexity perhaps out of reach and again talking about wine to young people, who increasingly want to learn and know this world, changing distribution models, with a large-scale distribution increasingly protagonist, and not only. Here are the usual topics of a wine sector which, as reminded by the president of Confagricoltura, Massimiliano Giansanti, “is worth 13,5 billions euros to production, of which more than a half to export”, to officially open the “Milano Wine Week” 2022, which, after the first toasts and the first initiatives over the weekend, that just passed, goes live from today until the 16th of October. And if Christophe Rabatel and Lorenzo Cafissi, CEO and Wine manager of Carrefour Italy, reiterated how “the enhancement of the great Italian labels passes from the work of the companies to the large scale distribution”, which especially during the pandemics became a very important channel, much more than before, for the quality wines, the president of Confagricoltura, Massimiliano Giansanti, took stock of today’s difficult situation.
“The wine sector is an extraordinary sector. In 20 years, exports have grown by + 165%, today it is worth 14% of the total agri-food, with 2.7 billion bottles sold worldwide. Numbers that say that wine is a fundamental sector in terms of economy, employment, but also innovation, because wine companies have always been at the forefront. The current situation is very difficult, but also unfamiliar, starting from very high energy costs. Which means that we should raise sales prices, but it is not easy to make the market digest them. Let’s hope the war ends soon, of course, and that’s the central topic. As a debate in Europe there are increasingly more of those who consider a wine as a harmful product, but we know well that this is not the case. And we must strongly reaffirm it, also by telling more to young people about the world of wine”.
And, if Luigi Scordamaglia focused on the theme of “storytelling”, and on the request to the government to come, to support the wine battles in the European Union, speaking on behalf of Coldiretti and Filiera Italia, Riccardo Ricci Curbastro, past president of Federdoc and at the top of Equalitas, returned to a historical theme. That is, do we have too many denominations? “Maybe yes, 526 of them are the testimony of a richness that we don’t know how to manage, it’s like the deposits of museums. We must know how to choose, because one part of this wealth knows how to stay on the markets, another must certainly be safeguarded, but in another way. 120 denominations make up 90% of the market, it is a fact on which one cannot but reflect. Finally, looking at European issues, I say: we must not be in competition with France and with others: the Italian wine heritage is part of Europe, and, in recent years, on many issues, although starting from different visions and interests, the European wine sector has been able to work together, obtaining important results”.
A call, made by Luca Giavi, director of the Prosecco Doc Consortium: “The request for warning on the label and the other similar things are pressing. It is a challenge that we must play together with other European countries, producers and not. In Italy we have a Mediterranean model of the meal consumption, which is not the same to the North European one, but we cannot even turn our heads: there are consumption phenomena among the new generations that can be deleterious, we cannot pretend that they do not exist. And on this we should come back to work. For us wine is sociality and family, and maybe we need to start with families. We must say it strongly and invest in young people, we must guide the model’s choice, not undergo them. We don’t need the barriers between countries, but we must do them against those who want to criminalize wine – as well as red meat - and we are asking the government to do so too”. Therefore a lot of topics, including tastings, events, forums, and debates, are still to be discussed in the “Milano Wine Week”.