From the return of vocation to a common “mission”: here’s what wine needs to do to get back on top

A fundamental and, if you will, watershed year is the one that is about to face the world of wine, Italian and not only. Many key issues are on the table: from a production “repositioning” that needs to take into account the increasingly unstable climatic conditions, to a new strategy that must, of necessity, look at the tastes and interests of the “new age” of consumers who appear far from the traditional wine product and, therefore, closer to something that in the glass expresses freshness and less alcohol content. Without forgetting the issue of transparency that represents, starting from the content in the label, a challenge that, the world of wine, can face with its history and its coat of arms making itself the spokesman thanks to a new model. But, above all, what is needed is an integrated and cohesive plan of the entire supply chain, a single direction that the actors of one of the products that is a symbol of Made in Italy agribusiness must draw, outlining the most important points that go hand in hand with the evolution of a sector that cannot look to the future with immobility. This, too, WineNews, spoke with Attilio Scienza, professor of viticulture at the University of Milan, researcher, wine humanist and president of the National Wine Committee, in a long audio interview. Which indicates the road to take again starting with the production vocation, because, more than those of the market, the sirens to listen to are first and foremost those that the territory of origin demands.
“We have lost the true meaning of vocation, what we can call territorial. The quality of a wine”, explains Attilio Scienza, “is the expression of a vocational relationship that exists between the environment where this grape variety is grown and the characteristics of the wine. The culture of “terroir” is deeply linked to this concept of vocation. I think the relationship should be exclusive: if vocation is this special suitability of a particular soil to produce a particular grape variety, we cannot think of producing ten different wines in one appellation, there is something wrong with that. I understand that the market needs to articulate demand over time with very different wines, first the more structured ones went now the lighter ones, but this means that we must not deviate from this fundamental idea of the exclusivity of vocation in an appellation. Doing viticulture in a territory, means socializing that nature, the appellation is above all an element with deep symbolic connotations. When a consumer buys that wine, linked to that territory, to that name, he buys first of all a symbol. Man has the responsibility to avoid too violent an action towards natural resources, this means inhabiting nature and making it functional to his goals through also an anthropological value that is given to that territory and also by transforming nature, because if we look at the vineyards of the most important areas in Italy and in the world, we will see how man has operated a profound transformation of that territory, of that landscape. Vocation is a much more complex thing than what we have in recent years attributed to our appellations. We used the appellation no longer as an exercise in truth, which from the Greek point of view means to make visible what is invisible; Plato said that in that forest there is already the table and the boat, it just has to be pulled out, alluding to the quality of the wood of the trees. Here, the quality of a wine is already in that territory, man only has to interpret that environment, in the choice of that grape variety, of that way of winemaking but also of marketing the wine to be able to express the truth. The wine label for us is the truth but that doesn’t mean that in that label we also put all the true contents of the vocation. We need to get out a little bit of the ambiguity that viticultural terroir has today, which pits myth against economic reality: we unfortunately cannot put the two together”.
And here we come to another issue related to appellations, which has long been talked about among insiders, and brought to the forefront in its own way by the recent report of “Report” on Rai 3: but really in the most prestigious appellations of high economic value, where the quality of the grapes and selection is a well-founded element, and where, if anything, there is a problem related to too much alcoholic richness, is Rectified Concentrated Must needed? For Scienza, “the request, which is normally made for enrichment with Rectified Concentrated Must, is a kind of parachute. It means that the producer protects himself against the outcome of the vintage when it has difficulties: enrichment thus becomes a tool to normalize quality. It seems like a nonsense because the Sicilians as well as the people of Trentino require it, but it is part of the risk of the winemaker who has to defend himself from inclement weather of an environmental or even pathological kind, think of downy mildew and what it did last year with damage to production and quantity. I think that with climate change, these rules that served in the 1970s and 1980s need to be revised. It would be interesting, and a good example, if the most important DOCGs decided to stop using enrichment to make sure that their wines are born entirely only from their good vineyard management. This can be done, with climate change it is much easier to obtain musts of very high sugar content, indeed, unfortunately, too high, from the point of view of consumer demand, which increasingly wants less alcoholic wines. The enrichment that the French make, with beet sucrose, is much more anomalous than ours, which is made with products derived from the processing of musts. Rectified Concentrated Must is really a product of great purity from the compositional point of view, it is only glucose and fructose that are obtained from the grapes. However, it would be necessary that, even in the light of climate change, the most important DOCGs, could say, “well, we believe in the privileged relationship that exists between that grape variety and that territory”; think of Sangiovese for Brunello di Montalcino and Nebbiolo for Barolo, where only one grape variety is used limited to a very precise territory. However, this is part of the autonomy that appellations and the consortia that represent them have: they are the ones who have to decide. Clearly, enrichment with concentrated musts is generally reserved for table wines or somewhat lower level Igt wines”. But do these products change the flavor of the wine? And are there alternatives on the market? “No, they don’t change the flavor”, Science continues, “but there is an alternative, unfortunately more expensive: for the past few years, one can have crystalline grape sugar, obtained through the use of resins; the separation of glucose from fructose from the must allows the sugar to crystallize, which does not crystallize if glucose and fructose are kept together. This is a high quality, very expensive product that can be used advantageously on value wines, not on all wines. It could be ideal for autoclave, bottle refermentation of great Metodo Classico sparkling wines”.
The history of the evolution of humanity, but of life in general, is linked to the word adaptation. But is Italian wine adapting to the changes in a society that seems to be going into a future where people will drink less wine and less alcohol? And what about no-alcohol wines, which are growing everywhere, including in France, but which cannot yet be produced in Italy because of an incomprehensible regulatory vacuum?
According to professor of viticulture at the University of Milan Attilio Scienza, “it is not easy to adapt in a short time a production tradition, which is at least a century old, to changes, on the one hand climatic and on the other of consumer demand. The effort is really important: if we think that our viticulture is articulated by zones, subzones, grape varieties, types of wine, to change it in a short time is very difficult. In the meantime, initial regulatory changes can be made, at the level of specifications and PDO wines, either by relocating production areas, bringing viticulture to areas where ripening is slower or by changing varietal compositions, returning to grape varieties that have a lower capacity to synthesize sugars, for example. Changes also within the specification in productions per strain, per hectare, in winemaking techniques. We have to try to adapt consumer demand to production conduction through rules also to guarantee the identity of the wine in which the consumer has to recognize himself. Then there is a regulatory aspect that is not easy to solve because in Italy if I remove alcohol from the wine, you enter a particular regulation”. One solution could be that “wineries apply to the state for the “status” of distilleries so that the alcohol, which they get from dealcolation, is subject to control. Of course, before we get to the point of producing alcohol-free wines, or partially no-alcohol wines, we need to find solutions that are not so extreme. There are many remedies, in cultural technique, in the choice of varieties; just think that we for so long focused on clonal selections that always had to produce a lot of alcohol, we should also change the selection criteria. The breeding forms we have always set them so that we have few grapes per strain but lots of grade, lots of sugar, lots of alcohol. You can also modify foliage management, soil management, we have so many possibilities”.
In any case, one point is fundamental: scientific research applied to vines and wine is a pillar for the future of the industry. And if a good part of the vine’s ability to adapt to climate change, including the increasing scarcity of water, also passes through the development of Tea, the Techniques of Assisted Evolution through Genetics, the issue of “certification” of the origin of bottled wine, the fulcrum of a system that bases much of its added value precisely on the territoriality of the wine, also passes through the study and analysis techniques. But specific statistical data are needed, which to date, for what they are, are not sufficient. “The conditions of the vintage are changeable, only the terroir and the grape variety do not change, it is a fixed point, and already in the past it has been understood that from the analysis of isotopes and other molecules contained in the wine we can tell whether it comes from a certain place or not. But we need a database, which the Ministry of Agriculture had started to do but then stopped, and the data we have today is insufficient to be sure that the data of that wine is referable to that environment where it was then produced”.
In this sense, Professor Scienza explains, the project of the “Vino Patrimonio Comune” Foundation, which unites Federvini and Alleanza delle Cooperative Italiane-Agroalimentare is interesting and important, “which has this goal”, Scienza explains, “namely to create a large database that allows us to verify the origin of wine, to avoid, also as a psychological deterrent, confusion and fraud”. With a reference, made by Scienza, to Southern wines still being used as “blending” wines for Northern productions, for example. “This must no longer be done, everyone must enhance their own products, in their own territories, with their own characteristics. We have to guarantee again the authenticity and sustainability of products, companies and territories, and this Foundation is a great initiative to put things in order. But we have to move closer, in the meantime, to the criterion of sustainability, with resistant varieties that will improve more and more to be close, as characteristics, to native grape varieties. Certainly, though, we will make the leap when we can create these resilient varieties through genetic modification”.
Space for good intentions for 2024, finally: “The most important thing”, Professor Attilio Scienza concludes, “is to create a great alliance along the supply chain. We still do not have a great project of an Italian viticulture that takes into account all the components of the supply chain, from the nursery to the consumer. There is no harmony. We need to get to the Thirties (of 2000, ed.) with a common project, France produced a very interesting study, four scenarios with which it drew the prospects for the development of the wine sector. It also takes courage, as France did, to say that 100,000 hectares of vines should be taken out. We have to go back and have the humility and the common sense to say that we put vines where they should not be put. We need a series of projects where, all parts of the supply chain can have their say and, on that, make the new national wine plan. There is also a serious problem of diminishing consumption. All these things need to be evaluated and solved”.