DOCa Rioja winegrowers ask to destroy the grapes from 8,225 hectares of vineyards

The green harvest is an unnatural measure, which involves throwing the bunches into the ground before they ripen from intact plots, but given the circumstances with a historical excess of wine in the winery warehouses, wine sales that do not rebound and the opportunity to access public aid has become the safest option for many winegrowers and cooperatives, who will be the main beneficiaries.

In fact, there are not a few suppliers who have been warned by the wineries to which they took their grapes that they would not collect their production, nor are there a few cooperatives that still have the 2023 harvest stored in their warehouses in a market scenario of internal purchase and sale of wine absolutely stopped and continues to wait for the product that can be withdrawn due to the green harvest and the announced distillations. Likewise, other wineries have chosen to partially collect the grapes from their suppliers, encouraging them to use the green harvest partially on all of their wine farms.

There are three autonomous communities that share territory within the DOCa Rioja (La Rioja, Basque Country and Navarra) and the greatest demand for green harvest has occurred in Rioja, with 6,004 hectares of the 46,107 productive hectares, that is, 13 % Of the surface.

This number of hectares adds up to the applications that, at the moment, are in the process of verification by the Ministry of Agriculture, who, probably tomorrow, will present the final list of admissions before sending it to the Ministry of Agriculture. Then it will be the latter who definitively validates the requests processed by all the regional councils of the territories that decided to benefit from this measure and, finally, it will be the admitted applicants themselves who must confirm that, in fact, they accept the conditions of the green harvest.

For example, last year, in the 2023 campaign, Agriculture processed applications for 985 hectares in La Rioja, of which only 827 were finally approved, in most cases due to resignations, although it is expected that this year there will be considerably less.

In the case of the Basque Country, with 13,344 productive hectares registered in the designation of origin, applications for green harvesting have been processed for 1,286 hectares, that is, almost 10% of the recognized surface, which multiplies by five those requested. last year, while in the case of the Rioja community they have multiplied practically six-fold.

In Navarra, the provincial government plans to allocate 5.5 million euros for compensation for green harvesting, after increasing the initially planned amount by 2.6 million when it was overwhelmed by demand, although in this case the funds are shared between two denominations of origin: Rioja and Navarra. Specifically, aid has been requested to destroy 1,453 hectares, of which the majority, 935, belong to winegrowers affiliated with the DOCa. In total, the Provincial Community has 7,347 productive hectares in Rioja, so 12.7% of the total has requested aid to not produce grapes.

Joint figures

Thus, there are 8,225 hectares of the 66,798 productive hectares in Rioja (with data from 2022) that have requested to benefit from the green harvest, 12.35% of the total, which could stop producing about 48 million kilos. of grapes if it is taken into account that, in the absence of the campaign regulations being definitively specified, the covered yield would be 90% for red grapes. In this sense, the bulk, practically the majority, of requests are for red varieties, mainly Tempranillo, so, if the 6,110 hectares of white varieties are excluded, in reality what is being asked to destroy this campaign is the equivalent of 13, 55% of the DOCa Rioja red grape vineyard (60,688 hectares in total).