According to harvest estimates provided by Member States, EU wine production – including wine and must – in 2021 (2021/2022 marketing year) is projected to be 147 million hectolitres. This is 13% lower than the 2020 production, down 23 million hectolitres. The adverse weather events in spring and summer, alternating from frost to floods and vine diseases linked to these climatic conditions, seem to have had a real impact on the EU 2021 wine harvest.
With an estimated production of 44.5 million hectolitres (a drop of 9 %), Italy would remain the biggest EU producer, followed by Spain (39 million hectolitres, down 15 %) and France (33.3 million hectolitres, a decrease of 27 %). The production of those three Member States, which account for almost 80 % of EU production, is estimated at 117 million hectolitres in 2021, falling by 23 million hectolitres (-17 %) compared with their production in 2020 at 140 million hectolitres.
Key facts:
- France, which is overtaken as biggest EU wine producer by Italy since 2016, would be ranked third (after Spain) for the first time.
- Germany and Portugal would increase their production by 4 % and 1 % respectively in 2021.
- Some Member States in Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia), although producing smaller volumes, show an upward trend.
- With a relatively small volume, the 2021 harvest would be 11 % lower than the average of the last 5 years, but still higher than the 2017 harvest. The latter was the lowest in the last 20 years, with an EU production of 144 million hectolitres.
- The amplitude of production variations is increasing from year to year. For almost 10 years, production has varied from year to year in much greater proportions than in the previous decade. This instability in volumes produced appears to be the direct consequence of major climatic hazards that are less and less predictable and more and more frequent.
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