Roundup: Wine fair Vinitaly closes with optimism about Italian wine industry

The mood among Italian wine companies was positive at Vinitaly, a leading international wine fair that took place from Sunday to Wednesday in the northern city of Verona.

Italy's wine industry is worth more than 10 billion euros (11 billion U.S. dollars) of which more than 5.1 billion euros is generated by exports, according to the fair's observatory.

Italy boasts one of the world's largest wine exporters with an estimated 20.5 million hectoliters equal to 21 percent of the world market.

Producers agreed that 2014 was a rather weak year, especially due to the economic and political scenario as a whole, international crises and monetary trends.

But the fair's observatory also indicated that a good percentage of companies enjoyed a favorable trend in the first part of 2015.

"Italian wine exports in 2014 were 1.4 percent up compared to growth rates above 6 percent registered in the previous years," Denis Pantini, area director for Agriculture and Food Industry of Bologna-based think tank Nomisma, told Xinhua.

"But I am optimistic about 2015 and 2016," the expert stressed. Though a decline in the domestic market continues to be structural, foreign markets offer increasing space for development, he said.

In his opinion, China will continue to be a key market in the coming years along with the United States, while prospective in Russia is more at risk given the geopolitical tension in the area.

"We are witnessing a sort of migration of wine consumption: since 2000 consumption in the European Union (EU) has fallen by 6 percent, while in other countries has grown by 25 percent," Pantini noted.

During the last 10 years, wine imports have grown in value by an annual average of 3 percent in the EU compared to 8 percent in third countries, he added.

Seizing the opportunities highlighted by new trends, such as a growth in production of organic wines, is important to approach both the domestic market and new consumers abroad, Pantini said.

"We estimate that the wine industry could generate 1.6 billion euros in new exports in the next three years," insurance-financial group SACE Chairman Giovanni Castellaneta told Xinhua.

In order to do so, he added, producers must capture "the full potential of external demand expressed by both its current reference markets and new emerging destinations, most of them located in Asia."

Castellaneta noted the Italian wine industry is composed primarily of small and midsize companies -- around 380,000 or 23 percent of all agricultural companies, according to Vinitaly's observatory -- that need the support of SACE and other groups alike to manage the risks of internationalization, obtain adequate access to financing and penetrate wide markets. (1 euro = 1.09 U.S. dollars) Endit