EONOLOGISTS: CRISIS REQUIRES SWIFT SOLUTIONS. THE SURPLUS PARTIALLY ABSORBED BY DISTILLATION THAT GOES TO LARGE-SCALE DISTRIBUTION WITH ATTRACTIVE PRICES AT 1 EURO AT TIMES FORCES EVEN DOCG AND NOBILE NAMES TO DESCEND INTO THIS UNHEALTHY COMPETITION

According to Mario Consorte, “The current situation of a strong market crisis imposes solutions with the most rapid effects. The trouble that European winemakers are experiencing today is closely linked to the level of chronic surplus that is partially absorbed by distillation and then poured onto the market, flooding supermarket shelves with attractive labels and prices between 0.80-1.50 euros, forcing even denomination wines (DOCG and even nobile labels) to stoop to this unhealthy level of competition. The value of wine in this situation ranges from between 0.25 and 0.40 cents per liter, equal to the market price of bulk wines in the 1980’s”. This was the statement made recently by the ex president of the Italian enologist association, Assoenologi.

“The protracted asphyxiation of the market, that has involved not only anonymous table wines but also important large production IGT and DOC names, has given to consumption at non remunerative prices, and put in crisis even companies that had believed and invested in quality. Within this picture, the intervention to lighten production is fundamental and serves to tone up a distorted market, asphyxiating and non remunerative, and which is creating worry for a large number of companies. This is the emergency that cannot wait for long-term solutions”.

What to do then? There are no doubts about it for Assoenologi: “We can renew faith to this healthy fabric of our winemaking economy with swift solutions for the problem of surplus linked to the adoption of incentives for explanting. The modulation in blocks of 100,000 hectares per year, with tight and continuous qualitative and quantitative monitoring would allow for the verification and eventual correction of the negative impact that many fear. It remains undisputed the need to simultaneously activate the interventions geared towards consolidation of the internal market and the expansion of the external market with a synergetic operation that, left alone to achieve its not easy objective, would be visionary”.

As for the preoccupations of an indiscriminate impoverishment of vineyards, could it also possibly include the viticultural patrimonies of quality wines? “A corrective made with the introduction of well evaluated limitations at a regional level while gradually abandoning aid for distillation, which should accompany the explanting measure, would become the key element for deciding the explanting of all of the productive realities that find motives for surviving precisely in the valorization that is foreseen with assisted destruction”.