Feature: As Italy fears smallest grape harvest since 1950, wine makers remain upbeat about vintage quality
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E-mail Xinhua, September 15, 2014
The only winning move in a cold and rainy summer, such as the current one, is to redouble your care for grape vines. This is what many Italian wine makers were counting upon, as their 2014 harvest started off quite inauspiciously.
Italy might face the worst grape harvest since 1950, a preliminary report by national farmers association Coldiretti stated earlier this week. Grape ripening has been hindered by an unusually overcast weather and frequent storms. With more grapes possibly damaged and an higher spoilage in the vineyards, the report forecast Italy's production to drop 15 percent, to 41 million hectolitres from 48.16 million hectolitres last year.
If confirmed, Italy would lose its "supremacy" as world's biggest wine maker by volume to France's advantage.
Yet, with only about 20 percent of grapes so far been picked, several vintners seemed resilient to the pessimistic outlook and still upbeat about the ultimate quality of their vintage.
"The summer started quite badly here, with heavy rains. Yet, I call ourselves lucky," Luigi Roagna told Xinhua.
"We had to deal with more grape diseases, such as late blight, but our vineyards mainly stretch over sandy soil, which is capable to absorb a lot of water," he added.
Roagna run the "Conti di Roero" winery in Vezza d'Alba, in the northwest Piedmont region. Surrounded by a beautiful landscape recently included in UNESCO World Heritage List. Roagna and his wife Daniela take care of 15 hectares of vineyards, and usually produce around 100,000 bottles a year.
But not this year.
"I reckon our production will be cut by 30 percent, partly due to the bad weather but also to our own choice," he said. "We have made a painstaking selection of wine grapes through the summer, and we will keep working in the vineyards, discarding less-than-perfect fruits, until the end of the season."
Thanks also to traditional hand-harvesting, which helps isolating every unhealthy grape, they were confident some of their finest products, such as red wines Roero and Nebbiolo d'Alba, would meet the best expectations.
Piedmont, which gives some of Italy's greatest red wines such as Barolo and Barbaresco, was indeed one of the regions most hit by bad weather and its volume might drop 10 percent, Italian Association of Enologists predicted.
But the vintner trusted the remaining, crucial, weeks before harvesting. "Our vineyards just need warm days and cool nights until beginning of October. If so, the vintage will be good despite all the problems," Roagna said.
A colleague from the central region of Marche echoed his words.
"Our harvest will start off a little later than usual, due to the rains, but seven to ten days of sunshine would be now enough for our best grapes to reach the perfect balance between sugar levels and acids," Raffaele Paolini told Xinhua.
His "PS Winery", founded with Dwight Stanford in 2008, has 6 hectares of both autochthonous and international varieties, and supplies 30 to 40 quintals per hectare. Their Syrah and three red wines were selected for the prestigious Merano Wine Festival 2014.
Paolini acknowledged their production would decrease this year. Some grapes, such as Merlot and Montepulciano, have already shown a 20 percent loss. As organic winery, furthermore, they use nothing but sulphur and copper fungicides, and biological treatments were more difficult to implement with heavy rains and a damp soil.
Yet, Paolini sounded confident.
"Our best wine, a red called Confusion, is a Bordeaux-style blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, and Petit Verdot," he explained. "These French grapes suffer less from rains, and they are healthy, by the result of our latest tests. This is why we are optimistic."
Since Italy stretches for more than 1,100 kilometres from north to south, furthermore, vintners also warned preliminary nationwide estimates on the harvest can be a little "risky," and what would be bad for some regions might be good for others.
"We know several northern wineries have faced difficult weather conditions, and we feel very sorry. Yet, a cooler summer was actually good for our vineyards," Patricia Toth, winemaker at Sicily's Planeta winery, told Xinhua.
With 360 hectares and a production of around 2.2 million bottles a year, Planeta might also see a 20 to 30 percent decrease in its harvest, Toth said. Yet, this would result from a chilly spring, not a wet summer.
"Only June rainfalls were abundant in Sicily. We have had short-duration rains in latest weeks, then, but they were needed to our vineyards, especially those on the slopes of Mount Etna," she said.
The chance of Italy losing the crown of world's biggest wine maker did not seem to worry the enologist, who was quite prudent regarding early estimates made by Coldiretti and Assoenologi.
Some vintages, such as this one, could be very difficult to assess since results would not be homogeneous and there could be huge disparities from region to region, even from area to area, Toth explained.
"In our winery, for example, we are seeing an outstanding quality of white grapes and French varieties in the western part of Sicily, where harvest is well under way. We are also satisfied with the Moscato di Noto, our non-fortified sweet wine, whereas I don't deem it proper to speak about our eastern vineyards, since they have not been taken into the winery," she said. Endit
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