The Valpolicella Wines Consortium has approved its 2024 budget, which closed with over 4 million euros in revenues (+6.3% on 2023), 75.5% of which was reinvested in the promotion and positioning of the appellation in Italy and abroad, and a profit of 11,500 euros.
“The 2024 budget highlights the Consortium’s commitment to promotion in a complex year for Italian wine and, in particular, for red denominations,” commented the president, Christian Marchesini. “An acceleration that has led us to implement around 70 initiatives and complementary activities, including events in 18 international destinations, incoming campaigns in the area and intense promotional planning on the domestic market. The global scenario,” continued Marchesini, “requires us to be pragmatic and have a strategic reaction capacity to keep the denomination in balance and guarantee profitability for the entire Valpolicella supply chain. For this reason,” he concluded, “we need to move away from self-referential logics or personalisms that, in such a changeable and insidious context, can undermine the growth of the entire denomination grappling with a positioning challenge that must be safeguarded with a cohesive vision, also through far-sighted production containment policies.”
On the protection front, last year the Consortium opened 27 disputes of which 16 have already been concluded positively, especially in China and in Scandinavian countries where the successfully archived disputes constitute jurisprudence in the discipline that protects Made in Italy agri-food. Amarone was the most “sounded” wine with 20 cases in 2024.
The membership base is also growing, with the entry of 11 bottling companies and 29 vintners for approximately 107 hectares of vineyards. With regard to production containment policies, the Consortium’s Board has resolved to block the Valpolicella DOC plants for the three-year period between 1 August 2025 and 31 July 2028. The shareholders assembly has given the President the mandate to formulate the request and manage the bureaucratic process, under the jurisdiction of the Veneto Region, aimed at formalizing the reduction to 10 tons per hectare of the maximum total yield of grapes allowed for the production of the wines ‘Valpolicella’, ‘Valpolicella Ripasso’, ‘Amarone’ and ‘Recioto’ for the next three harvests.
