Vitigno Italia turns 20 and fills up with visitors and foreign buyers

The twentieth edition of Vitigno Italia, an event dedicated to wine and its territories that started out national and soon became international, closed in Naples with over 10,000 visitors in three days. Of great importance was the presence of 30 specialised buyers who were selected together with Ice-Italian Trade Agency, which repeated in a Neapolitan sauce the work of profiling foreign buyers it has been doing for years for Vinitaly.

But what was particularly striking about the three-day event in Naples was the strong presence of the public, which on the opening day saw the entrance wristbands run out to such an extent that it was necessary to draw on the allocations for the following days so as not to leave wine lovers outside the halls of Vitigno Italia. While there are now 250 wineries present over the three days of the event.

'Vitigno Italia,' commented the director, Maurizio Teti, 'is today a bet won. A bet that twenty years ago very few believed'.

Vitigno Italia was founded around a hard core of wines from Campania and the south of Italy, but in the course of its no longer short life it has also managed to win over producers and organisations from other parts of Italia. For a few years now, the Consortium of Prosecco Docg di Conegliano e Valdobbiadene and the producers of Doc Friuli have been among the participating producers, as well as a large contingent of producers from Trentino. In fact, the event soon took on the important role of a platform for bringing together the supply of wine and demand from the lively Campania region, which in recent years of overtourism has become more and more of a protagonist from the city of Naples to the islands and other seaside resorts that have always been important tourist destinations from all over the world.

Vitigno Italia, therefore, has reached its full maturity, a phase that often brings with it important decisions.