Italian exports are booming on all fronts, both in terms of food and wine.
“The rebound compared to the Covid year is 16%, which if maintained would project the value of our shipments abroad to an absolute record at the end of the year”.
In the first six months of the year 2021, Italian wine exports reached record figures: in the space of a semester alone, it created a value of 3.3 billion euros. If the trend is this, it is estimated that by the end of the year the total turnover will be around 7 billion euros; numbers never registered before. The growth is not only noticeable in 2020, the year characterized by Covid, but also in the pre-pandemic period. Compared to 2020, the growth rate is +16% in value and +6% in volume.
“The segment of wines packaged in the first half of 2021 equals the performance of 2019 (+6%), while sparkling wines run at more than double speeds, with extraordinary rhythms in the US and Germany: in the United States, Italian sparkling wines mark +75% on the 2015/18 average, against +45% in France. On packaged wines, again in relation to the pre-pandemic average, in the US 2021 marks +12% versus +2% in 2019, in Germany +18% versus +5% and in Canada +19% versus +4%”.
Entering into the merits of the various segments, sparkling wines are the most appreciated and marketed type of wine. In fact, in the first half of the year, the overall growth was +26%: from April to June, however, the increase was more than +50%. The wine that holds the ranks is Prosecco, whose growth is around 30% both in value and in volume.
Followed bysemi-sparkling wines that perform at lower rates than sparkling wines (+5% in volume, +3% in value); however, it must be remembered that this type has always performed well even in the year of the pandemic, being one of the few to show growth. The Czech Republic is reconfirmed as the main destination Country for Italian semi-sparkling wines.
“The performance of still wines in the bottle: the +35% value in April-June must be seen in the light of the -12% recorded in the same quarter of 2020. The data is absolutely positive and, if we leave out London, the rest of the countries travel on rather fast growth rates. Among the product categories, the reds are better than the whites, but here too it should be emphasized that the whites had performed fairly well in 2020. In the US, the variations in value are typical of an emerging market: from +44% of Piedmontese to +21% of Tuscans and +15% of the Venetians”.
The full article of Il Corriere Vinicolo is available here.