Changing cultures / Italy: Market update

The trade-off between tradition and the drive for new markets is not an easy one for Italy’s producers, but many are beginning to find a middle path to export that suits all. Brian Jordan reports

Many people understandably assume Italy is an ancient country. Just take a look at the buildings. After all, the Romans came from Italy didn’t they? Well, they didn’t, they came from Rome just as the Venetian Empire was based on Venice and the Kingdom of Naples centred on Naples. ‘Italy’ as a unified political entity is a late 19th century concept, and places quintessentially Italian such as Rome, Venice, Verona or Florence were absorbed just a little over a century ago.
For more than a thousand years ‘Italy’ was simply a name derived from Oenotria – the ‘land of trained vines’ – originally a Greek generic word for southern colonies on their neighbouring Appenine-spined peninsular penetrating the Mediterranean, but over the ages extended to apply as a geographical description for the entire land mass south of the Alps.
In no way does Italy parallel traditional European countries such as Spain, France or Portugal, rather it mirrors Germany or Yugoslavia as an amalgam of disparate states, a product not so much of history as of pre-first world war political expediency.
Thus, logically, Italy’s diverse and confusing viti- and vini-culture reflects regional custom rather than national tradition, with origins dating in the north-east to the Austro-Hungarian Empire responsible for the pergola canopy training system, in the north-west to the Francophile House of Savoy with vines marching along orderly posts and wires, or in Sardinia where grapes are of Spanish origin thanks to the Kingdom of Aragon.
Even today the province of Val d’Aosta is French-speaking and Alto Adige’s Germanic background reflected not only in their speech but also in labelling such as ‘Auslese DOC’. Nobody ever got rich making generalisations about Italy or Italian wines.

This is the origin of Italy’s confusion of grape varieties and complexity of wine laws. The source of their preoccupation with local customs as, for example, when it comes to wine production Friuli, has more in common with Slovenia or Austria and Sicily with Malta or Tunisia than with any nebulous concept of a national ‘Italian’ wine identity. Probably Tuscany and Umbria, being more central, are more definitive of ‘Italy’ than most other regions where traditions owing more to heritage than to nationhood are governing factors.
Yet for at least 100 years there has been one aspect of Italian wine production that, until this last decade, held absolutely true. That the north and centre produced mainly ‘quality’ bottled wine, leaving the south as primarily producer of anonymous high-colour high-strength bulk wines, acting as a vinous engine-room not only for vermouths and north Italian reds, but also for many of Europe’s more anaemic wine regions. Blending wines has for long provided the largest proportion of Italy’s wine exports.

Bulk v bottled
Things might have changed years ago when the European Union introduced Vins de Pays/Vinos de la Tierra/Landwein and so on. At that time Italy created Vino Tipico (VT), but as the government never wrote this into Italian wine law, wines continued to be DOC or nothing. In the mid-1990s, the Goria Law made an attempt to make some practical sense of the mess Italy’s wine laws were in, but the only really useful development was creation of Indicazione Geografica Tipica (IGT) – Vino Tipico with a new coat – to take effect from 1995. Sadly that year’s IGT output had to be scrapped after belatedly discovering Rome had not advised Brussels of the change from VT to IGT.
But 1996 saw IGT arrive in style and this category has continued to grow until it now assumes the mantle of Italy’s Vins de Pays, not only by providing another parallel category, but by bailing out export figures as many major markets, especially in northern Europe, started their swing away from classic European regions toward New World-style fruity wines with simpler varietal labelling.

This caused a shift in the bulk versus bottled export figures, which are now nearer parity. Much wine previously non-DOC and therefore looked on with scorn and destined for blending, now proudly carries IGT classification and rightly stands alongside traditional DOC and DOCG wines, logically outperforming them on price and all too often on quality as well. They certainly perform as far as market suitability is concerned in several major wine-consuming countries.

Tradition v technology
All of which is gradually inducing a change in outlook. Originally, if it wasn’t destined for bulk wine there were only DOC laws, and people worked within these limitations to do the best they could, usually with one eye firmly fixed over their shoulder looking back to what had gone before. Which is fine. Tradition cannot be lightly cast aside. But it is an inescapable truth that the easiest way to sell wine is to offer wine the market wants. Thus, logically, companies anxious to succeed in export markets started turning to more New World ways of thinking, coincidentally at precisely the moment IGT arrived to provide the means to legally produce these designer-export products.
In the early 1900s, pre-IGT, several companies deserve credit for leading this movement, but GIV’s original work with Angela Muir MW for Sainsbury’s which subsequently became their Geoff Merrill range, and IWS’s Robin Woodhouse-brokered marriage of Jacques Lurton with Oronso Alo at CS Basilium in Basilicata for wines for Tesco’s International Winemaker range, followed a year later with nuptials between Kym Milne MW and Augusto Cantele in Lecce in Puglia, probably all tie for the honour.

The winemakers
Now, a decade later, we find a degree of foreign winemaker activity from northerly Trentino down a thousand kilometres to southern Sicily. Not every story is necessarily of outright and immediate success. Kym Milne working in Trentino held back from picking sauvignon blanc as he wanted greater ripeness. “You’ll be sorry,” he was told. And it came true when the crop was lost to rain and mildew. At CS Ronco at Imola in Emilia-Romagna, Gaetane Carron rented space to produce for Western Wines, and the management of the winery were so impressed they changed their own production to mirror her methods. Sadly, Italy was not ready for this New World-styled onslaught and Ronco is now owned by giant Coltiva and will probably be converted into residential buildings.

However, the legacy of the older generation of visionary Italian winemakers – Ezio Rivella, Attilo Scienza and Giaccomo Tachis in particular – are now joined by Carlo Corino, the Manera family and brothers Renzo and Riccardo Cottarella in the quest for expression rather just perpetuating tradition.
There are now dozens of export-oriented wines that will never see an Italian botega shelf, the potential of British supermarket giants and the Scandinavian monopolies sees to that. And for these markets northern companies have quickly realised the south holds most of the aces, most notably in the form of better weather for fruited wines, less DOC restriction and huge untapped potential of grapes previously condemned to bulk export but now realising considerably more cash as bottled IGT. In some areas this has been salvation for a number of indigenous grapes, for now as southern producers seek ever more Primitivo, Nero d’Avola and Negro Amaro it seems incredible that only a decade ago these were being uprooted at a furious rate driven by the misguided EU grub-up scheme.
Listing arriviste companies into southern provinces is a roll-call of Italy’s major producers – Giordano, GIV, Girelli, Antinori, Gancia, Zonin, Santa Margherita, Pasqua and so on, and the export-fuelled expansion of many local companies quick to realise their good fortune at being in the right place at the right time equally dramatic – Donnafugata, Firriato, Cantele, Settesoli, Planeta and many more.

But dramatic increases in IGT production and export-driven fruit-focused wines cannot hide the basic malaise of Italian wine production, namely a national average vineyard size of less than 0.8ha. And whilst new frontier pioneering spirit in the south inspires some of the larger relocated companies into venturing the difficult and expensive task of land purchase and planting licence acquisition, more than one company head has exclaimed in exasperation "I wish I’d never started this!"
The upshot of uneconomically-sized vineyards is that it makes producing high-volume branded wines of consistent taste very difficult. Among few exceptions are long-established Corvo di Salaparuta; Inycon, a joint venture between Settesoli and UK importer Enotria; Canaletto from Girelli and Claudio Manera’s New World influenced Araldica from Piedmont. In addition, Cavit produce quantities of Ecco Domani, Bella Sera and Maso Canali ranges for Gallo.

Lovely figures?
The expression Bella Figura has nothing to do with good-looking accounting figures, it refers to ‘presence’ or ‘style’ or ‘chic’. But what Italian wine production needs more than anything is less attention to Bella Figura image and more concentration on bottom line benefits from more proactive attitudes to exporting in today’s international marketplace. Aiming to make Bella Figuras mean what they sound as if they mean – beautiful (balance sheet) figures – is the proper way forward.

© db February 2003