Bureaucracy is blocking aid for PDO and PGI stocked wines, and payments to wineries

In 2020, during the Covid-19 health Pandemic, the measure regarding crisis distillation for table wines did not meet the predicted success. The fate of aid for PDO and PGI stocked wines was quite different, instead, since wine companies that had advanced requests for the entire ceiling of 9.5 million euros, which was made available by the various decrees (the first was the Legislative Decree number 34 dated May 19, 2020 that was definitively converted into law by decree 126 dated October 13, 2020) was quite different. In view of the expiration date for the period of stock aid (fixed at 6 months, the amount of aid was established at 6 euro cents per hectoliter per day for DOC and DOCG wines and 4 cents for TGI wines, stocked from July 31, 2020, ed.), the risk is that aid will not arrive within the indicated times to the Italian wineries, “tangled up"”, as often happens, in regulation and bureaucratic delays.
WineNews has learned that the Ministry of Agriculture has not yet issued the decree (which was supposed to be passed 60 days after the law was passed) with which it should have appointed the control body responsible for verifying the communications of what was declared in the wine producers’ requests, and how much is actually in the wineries. Upon verification, the agency for agricultural subsidies, AGEA, would be able to proceed with the investigations to allow payments. Further, according to insiders, most of the requests that were presented between the end of November and December 2020, when the measure was implemented (which, as rumors have it, should also be implemented in 2021 to help businesses definitively overcome the Pandemic), are about to expire, exposing a substantial impasse on the fundamental issue of actual payments to businesses...