As Italy’s wine sector looks ahead to the next harvest, it still has one more in the cellar

While among the rows of vines the grapes make their way to the harvest that is slowly approaching and in the cellar work begins to be organized for one of the most important and delicate moments in the life cycle of a winery, 43.5 million hectoliters of wine still dwell in barrels and barriques, slightly less than an “average” harvest, in quantity, to which 3 million hectoliters of musts and 44,758 hectoliters of new wine still in fermentation should be added. Figures that come from the June 30 update of Icqrf’s “Cantina Italia” published by the Ministry of Agriculture, and that tell of wine stocks declining by -12.2% on June 30, 2023, but should also be put into context in light of a 2023 vintage that is among the poorest ever (38.3 million hectoliters is the official Ministry figure, -23.2% on 2022, ed.).
As usual, more than half of the wine in stock (56.4%) is PDO, while 25.2% is made up of PGI wines (with 58.1% of the total of wine with a Denomination or Geographical Indication made up of 20 appellations out of 529), with the remainder being generic wines (17%) and varietal wines (1.4%). In the “ranking” of PDOs and PGIs with the most stocks, as always, Prosecco Doc dominates with 4.2 million hectoliters (11.9% of the total), followed by Igp Puglia (1.6 million hectoliters) and Tuscany (1.3) and, then, just above 1 million hectoliters, there are Igp Salento, Doc Sicilia and Delle Venezie, and, again, Chianti and Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.