The Assembly, with the representation of over 140 members, resolved to allocate 15% of the production of the 2020 harvest to storage. Among the various possible countermeasures, the most flexible was chosen: storage in fact by nature is reversible and would allow to release part or all of the wine at a later time, if market conditions and stock levels allow it. The Consortium has therefore chosen a path that puts the entire supply chain in a position to manage the volumes of product obtained from the next harvest with foresight, trying to guarantee a fair distribution process and stabilize market dynamics.
The Consortium has decided to tackle with decision the criticality of an excess of production potential with respect to market demand, so as to avoid accentuating the imbalances already present in the Supply Chain. " The Assembly clearly expressed its sovereignty. Our priority remains the defense of the value, quality, prestige and reputation that the DOC has built over the decades, in Italy and abroad in continuity with the Presidents who preceded me "- , underlines the President Ettore Nicoletto " With this decision we want to safeguard the future of Lugana and to do so it is necessary to act with tools and measures of governance of the offer, such as storage, in order to manage product volumes consistently, take pressure off the supply chain and mitigate the potential negative effect on grape and wine prices. The measures approved in the past as well as today's decision have certainly allowed to consolidate the positioning of Lugana among prestigious Italian whites and clearly indicate the way forward to give new impetus to value creation processes for the benefit of all links in the supply chain - from a vineyard by the bottle - which only fine wines, and as such recognized by the market, can feed, with positive effects also on the whole territory ".
Last year the Consortium had already introduced virtuous measures to reduce the gap in the relationship between stocks and bottled, " a path that " - as the Director Andrea Bottarel recalls - " was giving the desired results, thanks also to the excellent performance of the first two months of 2020, which then unfortunately suffered a new setback due to the health emergency in the months of March, April and May. Although we are witnessing a considerable recovery of the denomination, which is demonstrating its potential, it will be difficult to achieve the necessary growth to an immediate equilibrium. From the progressive comparison of the bottled products of the first 7 months of 2020 with the same period of 2019, a growth of 5.8% (*) emerges, with a forecast of closure of the bottling in 2020 in a positive way compared to 2019 (for a total of almost 23 million bottles), an almost unique case in the Italian panorama. But the performance gap between the various companies is quite large, precisely because the disparity in conditions between the different distribution channels (Ho.Re.Ca and GDO in primis), which arose during the lockdown, prevented this growth from being distributed uniformly both horizontally , both vertically within the supply chain ".
Storage of 15% is the solution recommended also by the in-depth analysis that CIRVE (Interdepartmental Center for Research in Viticulture and Oenology) of the University of Padua has conducted in recent months and which was shared with the consortium members before the Assembly . The technical-economic report on the status of the Lugana DOC has in fact highlighted how the DOC has experienced in the new century a particularly accentuated growth of its production potential, with the registered areas that in fact quadrupled between 2000 and 2018. The production is grown in parallel: with the 2018 harvest a maximum of almost 180,000 hectoliters was reached but in 2019, thanks to the interventions to contain the supply, the harvest gave rise to a production more in line with the average of previous years. Despite the excellent performance of bottling (which reached 21.8 million bottles at the end of 2019), the increase in sales was not perfectly proportional to the growth in production. The self-control of the supply to the final market put in place by the supply chain has for now made it possible to contain the negative effects on the price of the bottle, but it seems necessary to continue to implement measures based on the administrative storage of a portion of production, pending a consolidation of the recovery.
