UIV and Ismea: Vineyard Italy is in Great Health
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According to the UIV and the agricultural services agency Ismea, Italy appears set for a bumper wine harvest this autumn which should be in line with 2004 in terms of volume, year that marked the return to normality after the lower-than-average harvests of 2002 and 2003, sector sources said on Tuesday, while the quality should be similar to the great 2001 vintage.
"The forecast arrives at a delicate moment for the Italian wine industry, with ongoing following of the prices and still waiting for an answer to the request for a crisis-imposed distillation decision (by the EU authority), which will allow wineries to free space needed for the new production," explains UIV's president, Andrea Sartori. "On the other hand, this overproduction is a problem shared with the worldwide wine market."
Wine growers were concerned after sparse rainfall in June, but rain and cooler-than-normal temperatures in the first half of July, together with long and rainy winter, should produce healthy grapes for September. According to an Ismea-UIV report though, the situation is not uniform throughout the country. In Piedmont, for example, late spring reduced the Nebbiolo grape crop by some 10% .
In neighboring Lombardy, sufficient water supply permitted vines to withstand the June heat wave and the harvest will be good, even if just below the volume of last year. Volume will also be off in Veneto and Friuli, but this will be due more to the abundance of last year's crop, the report said .
Production in central Italy is expected to be closer to that of last year in the Marches and Tuscany, while volume will be down in slightly down in Latium because of damaging hail storms last month, when the grapes where just starting to bloom. On the other hand an increase in production is forecast for the southern regions of Molise, Apulia and Sicily, while volume should be the same as 2004 in Sardinia .
Wine experts agree that it is still to early to make any plausible predictions on the quality of the 2005 harvest. However, there is guarded optimism on the part of some producers who recalled that climate conditions this year are similar to those of 2001, one of the great vintages in recent memory.
| Source: Ismea |
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