The Bigot Index measures the quality potential of the vineyard from 0 to 100

Great wines are created first of all in the vineyard, so it follows that being able to measure the quality of a vineyard in the most objective way possible would be of enormous help to Italian wine producers. This is the goal of the Bigot Index. The Index takes its name from its creator, Giovanni Bigot, an agronomist from Friuli whose aim is to evaluate the quality potential of the vineyard, using a scientific approach based on years of research, experimentation and data collection of hundreds of hectares in Italy’s top terroirs, from Friuli Venezia Giulia to Piedmont, Tuscany, Umbria and Apulia. On February 1st, at the event to be held in the Castle of Cigognola, thanks to the various experiences and case histories around Italy, Giovanni Bigot, together with Angelo Gaja, with whom the agronomist has been collaborating for years, Stefano Poni, professor at the Catholic University of Piacenza, and Carlo Petrini, president of Slow Food, will present his conclusions and the index that bears his name.
“I have collected and archived data for years, in a carefully organized way”, Giovanni Bigot told WineNews, “looking for the correlation between the vineyard and the final quality of the wine, excluding the winemaking part. Honing these evaluations I identified nine parameters, and each has a different specific weight: height and production of the leaf wall and their relationship, health of the grape, age of the vineyard, type of water supply, grape cluster morphology, surface and subsoil biodiversity. These are simple measures to obtain, but one of the most important parts of the work”, the agronomist continued, “was to give weight to the different parameters and arrive at a final result, from 0 to 100, expressing the quality potential of the vineyard that the winemakers will then have to improve. More and more producers have been asking me about this type of evalutaion and I am convinced that based on the comparison of dozens of winemakers from all over Italy, these are the accurate parameters, with different weights”.