Harvest estimates: in the 2024/2025 campaign, the EU will produce 146.5 million hectoliters of wine

The 2024 harvest was particularly eagerly awaited after an ungenerous 2023, but the grape harvesting period was not without its difficulties, obviously with the various distinctions between area and area, mainly due to recent rains and, in general, pronounced weather phenomena among which drought rightly falls. Difficult, at the moment, to make a reliable and accurate sum for the vintage, with the grapes just finishing entering the cellar, although provisional data can help draw a picture of the situation. The latest quantitative estimate comes from the European Commission, based on data submitted by the wine-producing member states (18 countries) as of September 30, and speaks, for the 2024/2025 campaign, of 146.5 million hectoliters (-1.49% on 2023/2024), a lower number even on a five-year average of 160 million hectoliters. Italy is likely to be Europe’s leading producer in quantity, with an estimated 41 million hectoliters, 7% more than in 2023/2024, but still, a lower number when compared to the 47 million hectoliters averaged over the past five years. In Italy, just over 22 million hectoliters estimated for the 2024/2025 campaign are PDO, and 11.8 million hectoliters are classified as PGI.
France, again according to estimates, is the second largest producer, volume-wise, for the 2024/2025 campaign with 39, 3 million hectoliters, -18% over 2023/2024 and down on the five-year average of 43.5 million hectoliters. France that would feel the “breath on its neck” of Spain, with estimates of almost 38.1 million hectoliters, +19% over 2023/2024 (the average of the last five years is almost a million hectoliters more).
But we are talking, precisely, about estimates, which may deviate from others: in France, the most recent ones published by the Statistical Service of the Ministry of Agriculture, have gone down from the last surveys, and, therefore, with wine production in 2024 forecast at 37.5 million hectoliters, down 22% on the previous year and 15% on the five-year average. And in Spain, the figure released by the Consejo Sectorial Vitivinícola de Cooperativas Agro-alimentarias de España estimates a harvest of just over 37 million hectoliters of wine and must, which actually lowered the estimates made three months ago (39.7 million hectoliters).