Doc in box... at last!

Green light to the use of bag-in-box for Italian Doc wines. The decision, that has been taken by the Ministry of Agriculture after a very long debate, permits the use of bag-in-box with nominal capacity equal to or exceeding 2 litres. Doc wines with the mentions "vigna", "riserva" and "superiore" cannot benefit from this opportunity.

(translated and adapted from http://www.focuswine.it/portal/intxt.asp?idtext=4377&at=105109846V114628270A22925654084306&uid=REGGI565)

In Italy every controlled appellation wine has its own regulation, called "disciplinare", approved by the Parliament. Disciplinari are often criticized becouse they tend to be too rigid, leaving not enough opportunities to producers to compete in the global market. But something seems to be changing, probably in the right direction. This new law will help Italian wineries exporting their Doc wines in markets like Sweden, where bag in box has more than 50% of the market share.

EU wine sector reform approved

The Council of Ministers has formally adopted a wide-reaching reform of the EU wine sector intended to encourage the most inefficient European wine producers to abandon production and to help the sector face up to increasingly tough competition from ‘new world' wines. EU ministers rubber-stamped the agreement on 29 April, four months after EU agriculture ministers reached a political agreement on the deal at their council on December 2007. A key element of the reform package are vineyard ‘grubbing-up' premiums, which will be paid to all wine producers who decide to leave the sector on a voluntary basis – those who are the least efficient are likely to take advantage of the plan. The scheme will last for three years and apply to a maximum of 175,000 hectares of vineyard in the EU. Another plan is to remove some EU-funded market support to the sector by scrapping the ‘crisis distillation' scheme. Each year thousands of litres of unwanted wine are turned into industrial ethanol, a system that soaks up two-fifths of the EU's €1.269 billion annual wine budget. The reform will see the end of crisis-distillation spending in 2012. Under the plans, national governments will be allocated a sum of money to spend on their wine sectors, but spending choices will be limited to a number of measures that the Commission believes will result in an overhaul of the sector. Money can be spent on promoting EU wines abroad, on modernising the production chain and on other measures, including harvest-insurance plans. At the December 2007 farm council, ministers also agreed to reduce the amount of sugar that wine producers can use to fortify their wines. The Commission had wanted to see a complete ban on the use of sugar, which is used mainly in northern European countries, as a way of balancing out an end to the subsidies the EU pays to southern European countries, which use grape must to enrich wine. In the final deal, levels of both sugar and subsidies were cut, rather than scrapped. The EU's share of the world wine trade has been declining over the last decade. At the same time surplus production has been growing, two trends that prompted Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU's farm commissioner, to call for the reform. A Commission impact assessment published in May 2007 said that, without the reform, the annual EU wine surplus could reach as high as 13.9% of production. Moreover, in 2007 the global market share occupied by EU wines stood at 62%, down from an average of 79% between 1986 and 1990, when EU wines where at their most popular, the Organisation International de la Vigne et du Vin wrote in report published on 28 March. During a similar time frame, the market share has grown for ‘new world' wines, from countries including Chile, the United States, Australia and Argentina. “The reform will allow us to concentrate on taking on our competitors and winning back market share,” Fischer Boel said on 29 April. The reform will now come into force on 1 August.

(from http://www.europeanvoice.com/article/2008/04/28april5may/reform-of-eu-wine-sector-approved/60535.aspx)