Organic vineyard continues to grow in Italy, but organic wine accounts for only 6%

Organic vine areas continue to grow in Italy, but the volume of organic wine still has a marginal overall weight, covering 6% of national production. Interest, however, is strong, as shown by the numbers of wine operators who are now close to touching the 30,000 mark, but also by the incidence of organic vineyards on the national total (589,570 hectares), which has reached 22.6%. This is stated in the Ismea Report “Organic wine: the numbers of the supply chain updated to 2022”, according to which in total organic in Italy covers a utilized agricultural area of almost 2.4 million hectares (equal to 18.7% in the European Union) for just under 93,000 operators. Specifically, in terms of organic vine acreage, Italy’s vineyard covers more than 133,000 hectares (up 6%, or an increase of 7,540 hectares over 2021) of which 76.5 % is converted. An extension that spans the length and breadth of Italy, with Sicily (36,937 hectares) and Tuscany (22,802 hectares) as the “greenest” regions.
Since 2010, the organic vine area in Italy has grown by 163% (82,577 hectares), a trend that has not stagnated in recent years if we consider that from 2020 to 2022 Italy’s organic vineyard counts 18,124 hectares more. More than 65% of the certified organic wine-growing area is concentrated in Sicily, Tuscany, Apulia and Veneto.
Numbers that, however, do not automatically translate into wine production: in fact, the volume of organic wine amounts to more than 3 million hectoliters (source: Sinab processing of data from Telematics Registers - Cantina Italia/Icqrf as of February 2, 2023), equal to 6% of total national production. Regions with the highest number of wineries are Tuscany, Veneto, Piedmont, Sicily, and Emilia Romagna while those with the highest production numbers are Sicily, Veneto, Tuscany, Apulia, Abruzzo, Marche, and Emilia Romagna. For organic wine operators (29,910), the growth over 2021 is 3.4% and they represent 32.2% of the total organic operators: a real boom with a 93% increase since 2015.