All over Italy for about 15 to 20 days the flowering has been completed in a positive way, as this year Italy has fortunately not suffered any frost damage.
On the contrary, from the beginning of May until 10/15 June we had a meteorological period characterised by intense and continuous rainfall, which affected practically the entire country.
While the rain had been expected for almost a year, particularly in the northern regions after a very long and severe drought, it created quite a few problems for agriculture and vineyards in particular.
These continuous rains have in fact prevented the normal seasonal treatments in the vineyards to fight downy mildew, which has found ideal conditions to spread in an extremely aggressive manner, directly affecting the bunches of grapes. And this situation continued for several weeks!
Fortunately, the rains have been over for a few days now and as of today, 21 June, we are beginning to estimate the damage, which affects several Italian regions, in particular Abruzzo, Marche, Apulia and Sicily.
In all these regions a crop loss of 20% to 30% is estimated, although it will still take at least a couple of weeks before a definitive estimate of the damage can be obtained, which will obviously cause serious problems especially for organically managed vineyards.
On the price front, this situation has led to a tightening of quotations, which had been falling slowly but steadily for several weeks now.
It should also not be forgotten, however, that as far as stocks or surpluses in the cellar are concerned, there are currently in Italy around 3 million HL of wine more than in the same period last year. And this figure should largely balance the loss of grapes due to downy mildew.