There is a first consideration to make: in terms of quantities produced, 2023 was historically the most generous vintage for English wine and the worst for Italian wine. It is not a ranking of who or where the best bottles are made, but rather one substantial acknowledgment of how things are changing. And quickly too.
Accused number one is the now sadly known one climate change, which last year “gave” the world the hottest summer in history and which sees Europe, among other things, overheating almost twice as fast as the global average. To all this the vine is responding with increasingly smaller quantities of productsmall and concentrated grapes, early harvests and diseases that proliferate in the winter months, which are no longer so cold.
2023 is the hottest year ever. The World Meteorological Organization: “All records broken” by Elena Dusi 30 November 2023
In 40 years, the vineyard area has halved
However, numbers weigh more than words. In 1982 the area under vines in Italy was almost 1.2 million hectares (Italian Wine Union data), today the latest census stops at 674 thousand. Narrowing the field to the last two decades, the country lost first 12% and then another 11% of vineyards, with clear repercussions also in terms of the quantities produced. And last year, for the first time in almost ten years, Italy has ceded the scepter of the world‘s largest wine producer, slipping behind its French neighbors.
2023, for Italian viticulture, was in fact a thousandth of great difficulties. At the spring downy mildew (disease that affects plants), the extreme climatic events in May in Emilia-Romagna and, finally, a long one dry summer period. The solution is then becoming only one: leave the sea and move higher and highertrying in the meantime to discover exhibitions that until now were considered uninteresting.
Longing for the mountains
In a study presented at Vinitaly 2013 by researchers from Conservation International it was argued that by 2050 86% of the Mediterranean areas where wine is produced today will no longer be suitable for this purpose. A few years later, in 2018, a conference organized by the Alliance of Agri-Food Cooperatives drew more or less similar results, with conclusions that point in a very specific direction: to find the most favorable climate, estimates say that grape crops will have to rise about 800 meters above sea level and move further north.
This is an inexorable process which, in reality, has already been underway for some time. The data on the loss of vineyard areas are in fact not homogeneous. If in the last twenty years the islands have lost 28% of the hectares dedicated to vines and southern Italy has achieved a minus 21%, the north-east has on the contrary grown by 20%, driven up in particular by fashion of the Proseccowhich pushed the production of Glera (the white grape at the base of the renowned sparkling wine) almost to excess.
Speaking again of percentages, currently 49% of the vineyards – a figure which is constantly decreasing (apart from Veneto) – are located in the plains, while 51% are spread across hilly (42%) and mountain areas ( 9%). However, there are cases such as Umbria, Abruzzo and the autonomous province of Bolzano in which the vines in flat areas no longer exist today. And still others such as Tuscany, the Marche and even more so the Aosta Valley where they are absolutely marginal.
Frescobaldi’s opinion
“It is undeniable that something is happening. Think about it – says the Tuscan marquis Lamberto Frescobaldi, president of the Italian Union and wines, and owner of one of the most famous brands in Italian oenology – that in southern Tuscany there are vineyards that have already put out their leaves”. «But more than a problem of degrees centigrade – he adds – it’s a problem of extreme eventsagainst which there is no work of man that can manage them”.
Here then altitude becomes a solution, although not the only one. “We will have to learn to adapt – assures Frescobaldi – orienting the compass towards new paths. This is why in recent years we have gone to explore cooler slopes, such as those previously unthinkable to the north. Or, as already mentioned, you look up. We, for example, will invest in an area 760 meters above sea level in the Apennines.”
Opportunities to be seized
According to the number one in Italian oenology Riccardo Cotarella, president of AssoenologiHowever, there are also opportunities that can be seized. Starting from an upward repositioning of the prices of national wine. “Personally – explains Cotarella – I have never been a supporter of our production record, but not so much for the fact itself, but rather for the mentality behind it”. A mentality that last year led to the opening of the harvest with warehouse stocks of over 43 million hectolitres. «The production loss – adds the expert – I hope can be transformed into a lesson. It is in fact important to understand that we should produce a kilo less than what the market requires, so as to be able to activate pricing policies that position Italian wine higher”.