The trade of Grapes

The world trade of grapes has always been a flourishing trade: consumers of wine, table grapes and products linked to vine and grapes are millions and millions, simply fond of the unique taste of this fruit or real collectors of grapes' products, such as wines. Oenology, in fact, has made great progress in latest years, as to methods and equipments. Since the Eighties, it opened to international innovations, imitating the French market. Nowadays the most advanced realities of the oenological sector are represented by countries of Latin America, Australia and South Africa. In Europe, instead, Romania made significant progresses. These are countries with undisputed optimal climatic conditions for vine and that have invested a lot in order to learn the best know-how from countries, such as Italy, that have a strong oenological tradition. However, this arose some problems: technicians of these countries, in fact, once acquired the best methods and techniques used in the sector, spread them in their homeland.
Italy is one of the first countries that produce grapes in the world, ranking third after China and the United States: its production is of about 14 million quintals of grape. Regarding the export of grapes, Italian grapes are exported for the 88% to EU countries, and only for the 12% to non-EU countries. The major European buyer of Italian grapes is Germany, with more than 110,000 tons, while, among the non-EU countries, stands out Switzerland, which buys more than 28,000 tons of grapes coming from Italy.
Other non –Eu countries, apart from China, are however entering with decision the world wine growing sector: between 2005 and 2011, for example, the exports of fresh grapes from Peru showed an average annual growth rate of 43.7%, passing from 33.9 million dollars to 299 million dollars, nowadays holding the record as major country that exports grapes worldwide.
In 2010 the production of table grapes and grapes for the wine production was valued around 18 thousands quintals, the same quantity of the Iranian production, also in India: India ranks for this reason ninth among the world producers of grapes and is one of the few world countries where this production is growing, as in China (third world producer), in Turkey (sixth producer) and in Argentina (eighth producer).