Lorenzo Biscontin
This year too I survived Vinitaly. Mind you, I’m not saying this in a negative sense, it’s not that I went against my will, but there’s no doubt that four days of Vinitaly as a visitor are a test from a physical point of view, about ten kilometers on foot every day, and psychological (arriving at 6 pm in the afternoon you don’t feel like seeing or talking to anyone).
Once I’ve sobered up, only figuratively, I swear, I try to think about it with a cool head.
Vinitaly is getting denser and denser.
97,000 visitors (like last year), over 4,000 exhibitors (a little less than last year), exhibition areas in every free corner of the fairgrounds.
Some have noticed larger spaces in the pavilions. It didn’t seem like it to me, but, if so, it’s a good thing because on Sunday and Monday the crowds were so big that just to cross them you got stuck in traffic jams of people.
Also packed with events with a succession of conferences and tastings. To this, I make amends, we also contributed in our own small way with the press conference in which the President of the Tuscany Region Eugenio Giani signed the letter of intent to promote the entry of Tuscan wine consortia into the new Cantina Italia platform.
The result is that the list of missed meetings is almost as long as the list of meetings held. And this without having participated in any conference or tasting, a choice that I regret but is necessary.
No/Low alcohol wines have been definitively cleared.
In the space of a year we have more or less gone from the line “only over my dead body” supported by the ministry and many producers to the normalization of de-alcoholized wines. There is the law to produce them, they had a dedicated space at the fair and were welcomed by the producers, Angelo Gaja and Riccardo Cotarella at the head.
There are still doubts on the part of wine critics and wine lovers who shudder at the sight of the words “wine” and “dealcoholized” together.
Is dealcoholized wine something different from wine? Of course, so what? Any battle over terminology is now a losing battle, a rearguard one, given European and Italian legislation. Above all, no one is forcing anyone else to produce or drink anything they don’t want to.
If we are making a lot of noise about nothing, the market will decide with its free choices.
In the end, there was little talk about US tariffs.
Whether it was due to the relief of having gone from the threat of 200% to the reality of 20% (which later became 10%) or because it is a topic that the individual winery can do nothing about, in the end, there was almost no talk at the US tariff stands.
They preferred to focus on business development, perhaps expanding to other markets, as the best response to address the problem.
Instead, it was discussed in conferences where politics was the protagonist, already bringing home some positive results for the sector (the exclusion of EU duties on American whiskey in response to US duties on European steel.
I report the comment of an important journalist in the sector “We must be careful about demonstrating too much optimism, both because the problem remains serious, but above all because in this way we risk giving politics the wrong signal that there is no need to commit on this front”.
Vinitaly is a festival that celebrates Italian wine
Both Vinitaly and Vinitaly and the City, the off-show event that is an integral part of it, are more than a fair: they are the festival that celebrates Italian wine.
The main advantage is that in this it makes Vinitaly a center of attraction of attention to the sector by the whole of society that goes beyond the simple dimension of business (and it is also the reason why many operators willingly come to Verona, despite all the difficulties and logistical costs).
The disadvantage is that observing the Italian wine sector only through Vinitaly means looking at it through a distorting mirror. It would be like observing the diet of Italians by looking at what they eat at New Year’s Eve dinner.
