Cantina Italia: 56 million hectoliters of wine (down), 57% in the North (stable), 51.3% DOP

Wine stocks in Italian wineries are still going downhill. The latest report of the Ministry of Agriculture “Cantina Italia”, issued on March 15th, revealed there are 56 million hectoliters of wine, 6.1 million hectoliters of musts and over 300.000 hectoliters of new wine still in fermentation. On the same date in 2019, the quantity of wines in Italian cellars was 57.5 million hectoliters; there were 6.9 million hectoliters of musts and 490.000 hectoliters of new wine still in fermentation. These 2019 numbers are also, as WineNews had pointed out, the result of the 2018 vintage, which yielded 16% higher production compared to 2019. Going into further detail, more than 57% of the wine stocks in Italy are physically in the Northern Regions, and about a quarter of the national wine is in Veneto alone. This is mainly due to the stocks of the provinces of Treviso (10%) and Verona (9%), which are stocking more wine (10.7 million hectoliters) than Apulia and Sicily put together (9.7 million hectoliters).
The electronic wine register also revealed that 51.3% of the wine in stock is PDO, and there is a prevalence of red wines (51.7%). The percentage of PGI wines is 26.6%, and again also a prevalence of reds (54.6%), while instead varietal wines make up only 1.3% of the total. The remaining 20.7% of the stocks is table wines. Even though there are a large number of DO wines present (526), ​​10 Denominations make up 40.7% of the total wines in DO, and the top 20 Appellations represent more than half of the total (56.8%).
At the regional level, there are 13.8 million hectoliters in the Veneto Region wineries, 6.6 million in Emilia Romagna, 5.9 million in Puglia and 5.8 million hectoliters in Tuscany. Continuing on, Piedmont stocks total 4.3 million hectoliters, Sicily 3.6 million and Abruzzi 3.1 million hectoliters. In the Lombardy Region wineries there are currently 2.6 million hectoliters, while in Trentino Alto Adige 2.3 million and in the wineries in Friuli Venezia Giulia 2.1 million hectoliters of wine. As far as Denomination wines are concerned, the largest stocks are Prosecco totaling 3.8 million hectoliters (8.9% of the total stocks): 1.5 million from Sicilia Doc (3.6%) and Delle Venezie (3.5%); 1.4 from Montepulciano d’Abruzzo (3.4%); 1.3 from Chianti (3.2%); 850.000 hectoliters from Chianti Classico (2%); 845.000 from Prosecco di Conegliano and Valdobbiadene (1.9%); 560.000 of Valpolicella Ripasso (1.3%); 550.000 of Trentino Doc and Franciacorta (1.3%) and 530.000 hectoliters of Barolo (1.2%).