Prosecco Docg, the strength of a district. Growing also in 2020 with Covid

In a very difficult 2020, having maintained the levels of a 2019 is a small great economic miracle. Successful in the Conegliano Valdobbiadene Prosecco Superiore Docg district. Despite the pandemic, it managed to recover in Italy the volumes lost in the world (+2.5%), thanks to large-scale distribution (17% in volume and +15% in value) and e-commerce (more than tripled), with exports that grew in value (+2.2%). With a small but significant growth in production volumes on the market (92.1 million bottles) and values (526.6 million euros in production). This is stated in the preview of the economic report of the Denomination for the year 2020, edited by the Interdepartmental Center for Research in Viticulture and Oenology (Cirve) of the University of Padua, illustrated by Eugenio Pomarici.
Data that are comforting, underlined the president of the Consortium Innocente Nardi, “that should not make us think that everything is simple and that the difficulties of the pandemic are overcome in full, but that should give us confidence. And which tell us that the right path is that of high-level partnerships, like the one we have signed with Eataly in London”. Here, in the store that opened on April 29, “with the official inauguration together with the mayor of the English capital, which will take place in the next few days”, said the CEO of Eataly, “together with the Consortium we have created a special section dedicated to the territory, telling its peculiarities, the Rive, and this serves not only to sell, but to create value, because as we have always done with Eataly, first of all we tell the story and the territory of the product, we educate the consumer, even before selling the product. And things are going very well, there have been queues since the beginning, I think that the London store will be the most important ever, after those in Turin and Milan. Here we also have the largest Italian wine shop outside Italy, with over 2,000 labels that we import directly from Italy, and this allows us to have a better selection, and a better marginality”. And it is not excluded that the format dedicated to Prosecco Docg, if it has the success it seems to have in these early stages, will be replicated in the other Eataly of the world, and maybe in the future also with other territories, said Nicola Farinetti, responding to a question asked by WineNews.
In the meantime, however, certainties, for Prosecco Docg, come from the numbers. The overall sales of the Denomination, in 2020, recorded, in volume, a substantial parity with last year (+0.02%) and a slight increase in value (+0.4%), reaching a new maximum since its recognition. This despite the forced closure of restaurants and wine shops, the channels that generate the real value of the product. These data reward the strategies of supply control and promotion implemented by the Consortium.
The real change at market level, underlines the report illustrated by Eugenio Pomarici, is recorded in the sales channels, with a three-digit growth (although starting from relatively low absolute numbers) of e-commerce (+325.8% in volume and +425% in value, with a share that in the channel reached 3% of the total) which shows the dynamism of companies and the ability to react to sudden changes in the markets.
Companies have, therefore, reacted to the extraordinary circumstances imposed by the pandemic by shifting an important part of volumes to the domestic market, which absorbed 58% of volumes. A high level of ability to interpret trends was evident in the choice of international markets. Faced with difficult situations and the total closure of some important markets (emblematic is the case of the UK, the leading market for Prosecco Docg, already down 36% in volume and 25% in value, but also that of the USA, down 39% in volume and 41% in value), the companies easily turned to other interlocutors, thus opening up new markets. In Europe, double-digit growth was registered by the Benelux countries (25.9% in volume and 27.6% in value), Austria (34.3% in volume and 24.5% in value) and Scandinavia (up 54.4% in volume and 61.7% in value), while Germany, the second largest market (up 2.3% in volume and 8.5% in value) and Switzerland (up 8.6% in volume and 14.3% in value) also performed well. Across the Atlantic, Canada posted an 11.7% increase in volume and a 14.8% increase in value, while Japan, with a 224.1% increase in volume and a 243.9% increase in value, launched the trend of sparkling wines in the Far East.