NEWS
MY EXPORT Antonio Michael Zaccheo – Carpineto 1 What is the percentage of exports on the company total? We export 90% of the production. In the last months we reached 94% because of the collapse of the domestic consumption. Our top 5 destinations, in descending order, are Canada, USA, Switzerland, Germany and Australia.
2 Where do you sell the most and the least? Right now, we are selling very good in the large-scale distribution, wine chains and monopolies. Of course, we’re suffering as much as the restaurants do, but I’m sure this segment will recover soon.
3 What has changed? How are exports performing after the lockdowns? In the countries where we are prevalently Horeca, things are going very badly: in Italy we lost 45% of our revenue in 2020, with a similar performance in Asia. Fortunately, we now know that wine is a fundamental part of family life. It is no longer drunk at restaurants but at home. We have also understood that wine is immune to the pandemic, thank goodness!
4 How are things going with bureaucracy? In one word: very bad. Let me give you an example. Is it possible that on a OCM program that starts on April 1st we still do not know if we are in the ranking list, which foreign countries get the funding and how much money we could spend? How can we plan with the big world organizations that run promotions and marketing activities a year in advance, if we don’t know how much money is in the tank?
5 Tell us an anecdote related to your experiences abroad. Late autumn, I’m inside a big hotel in a huge Chinese city. I’m dining at an Italian restaurant for a winemaker’s dinner. Everything goes very well. At the end of the meal, the sommelier takes me to meet the owner of the place, which owns the restaurant, the hotel and some other skyscrapers in the same area. At the table there are 6 people and they are eating their second ‘ball’ of white truffle. It was a hot and dry year, the truffle market was close to 5,000 euros per kilo...in Italy. While entering the room, the Chinese tycoon offers me a glass of wine of an exceptional vintage, served in a beautiful crystal glass from a magnum bottle (which costs over a thousand euros). He asks me if I would like to drink it as they do, that is, with a nice grating of truffle inside. I reply that maybe at the first round I take it ‘natural’ but then with the next glass I have to try their version as well...no comment! This example shows how Italian cuisine has an neverending appeal, but the sensitivity and culture to appreciate its intrinsic quality is still lacking: this should be the focus of information campaigns around the world for the next few decades. Carpineto | Dudda | Greve in Chianti | Firenze
GAMBERO ROSSO
11
MARCH-APRIL 2021