In the pubs, restaurants and wine bars of Britain prosecco has never been so popular, but producing the sparkling wine in the rolling hills of northern Italy is leading to soil erosion on a huge scale, a report claims.
With prosecco eclipsing Champagne in popularity and around 500 million bottles produced each year, new vineyards have been planted in Italy’s northern Veneto region as wine makers cash in on the boom.
But when rain falls on slopes that are denuded of natural vegetation, soil is eroded and pesticides and fertilisers leach into streams and rivers.
The study by scientists from Padua University claims that for every bottle of prosecco produced, 4.4kg (10lbs) of soil is lost. That amounts to around 400,000 tonnes of soil each year.
British drinkers play an unwitting role in the problem – the UK is the largest overseas market for prosecco, followed by the United States and Germany.
In the area of Veneto where prosecco is produced, between the towns of Conegliano and Valdobbiadene, vineyards account for nearly three-quarters of soil erosion, the researchers claimed.
The rate of soil erosion there is “11 times higher than the Italian average.”
The area covered by prosecco-producing vineyards has increased from around 4,000 hectares two decades ago to around 7,000 hectares, as pastureland and woods are planted with vines.
“Economic and production factors are driving drastic changes in land use…and fueling the debate about the sustainability of vineyards,” the report said.
The effects of global warming are only likely to make the problem worse. “Considering the emerging climate change scenarios in Mediterranean regions, an increase in frequency of extreme rainfall events in spring and autumn” will exacerbate soil erosion and water run-off, the researchers warned.
The loss of soil could be prevented with the introduction of “nature-based mitigation measures” – namely the planting of hedgerows, rows of trees and the grassing over of denuded areas, the scientists said. That would produce a three-fold reduction in the quantity of soil lost, they said.
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Salvatore Pappalardo, lead author of the study, said it still had to be peer-reviewed. “But we are confident of our findings,” he told The Telegraph. “It will be published in a leading international scientific journal in the next two weeks.”
Italy hopes to have the prosecco hills of the Veneto region recognised by UNESCO as a World Heritage area and there have already been calls for the rapid rate of vineyard expansion to be halted.
There are “environmental consequences” to the planting of more and more vineyards, Graziano Azzalin, a local politician and the vice-president of a regional agricultural commission, warned this month.
“The boom in production risks having a boomerang effect,” he warned, harming the environment and reducing productivity.
“Until now the sector has benefited from generous financial incentives which have produced an ill-advised expansion” of vineyards, he said. The prosecco boom could soon result in “a painful hangover.”
A consortium representing prosecco producers responded angrily to the report, calling it unfounded and sensationalist.
The report’s findings were “not demonstrated with objective data but only by means of specious empirical models,” the Consortium for the Protection of Prosecco DOCG said in a statement.
The estimates of soil erosion were “imprecise and hypothetical”. The consortium said that “soil management and concrete steps to combat erosion have, for three centuries, been a constant priority for vine-growers in the Prosecco Superiore area.”
The region had grown grapes “since at least the time of Napoleon” and wine producers had preserved the landscape “in an impeccable manner,” the consortium said.
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The debate over the environmental effects of the prosecco bonanza began in 2014, when a devastating flash flood in the region killed four people.
Some blamed the flooding on the clearing of woodland to make way for new vineyards.
“It’s a big mistake to adhere to a monoculture, both from the point of view of productivity as well as the environment,” Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food movement, said at the time.
Wine producers dismissed the accusations, saying that their terracing of the land made it less vulnerable to floods and landslides.
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Luca Zaia, the governor of Veneto and a champion of prosecco producers, has long argued that vineyards have been made a “scapegoat” for environmental damage.