PIWI Grapes in Italy: The Vineyard Wins, the Market Stalls, and the Law Doesn't Care

Summary

PIWI grapes—from the German PilzWiderstandsfähig, meaning fungus-resistant—are not a fringe experiment anymore, whatever the holdouts still argue. Agronomist Nicola Biasi has put hard numbers to what growers have been watching in their own vineyards for years: where traditional organic viticulture can demand up to twenty treatments a season, resistant varieties routinely get by with four or five. Producers in his network are recording CO₂ reductions of around 40% and a 70% drop in water used for treatments against conventional benchmarks. None of this is seriously contested at this point. The more interesting wrinkle comes from Mario Pojer of Pojer & Sandri in Trentino, a grower who has built his reputation on pushing toward zero-treatment viticulture. Even he isn't claiming the picture is clean. Secondary pathogens—black rot and anthracnose, the kind that used to get knocked back quietly as a side effect of routine anti-downy mildew sprays—have started showing up again in PIWI plots. Pojer isn't abandoning the approach, but he's rethinking parts of it, and he also flags cisgenetics as the direction he expects classical crossbreeding to move toward next.

The article maps the situation carefully enough, though it doesn't press very hard on anything. Gianni Tessari, a producer from the Veronese, positions PIWI as a practical answer for difficult sites—steep ground, humid pockets, vineyards near schools where drift from spraying is a real problem. He also makes what is probably the article's most useful observation: nobody has figured out how to sell these wines yet. Organic? Natural? Resistant? Named by variety? The category is still floating without a home. Zanatta, enologist at Giusti Wine, points to an 80–90% reduction in treatments as compelling ecological marketing, but says traditional expectations keep getting in the way. Martin Foradori Hofstätter is more pragmatic about it—most consumers still pick wine by producer or place, not by a grape name they haven't encountered before. Meanwhile, Italy's Testo Unico del Vino continues to shut PIWI varieties out of DOC classifications entirely, a position no other major European producer holds. France has moved Voltis into experimental AOC status. Spain has cleared a PIWI variety within an appellation framework. Italy is staying put, and the market, for now, seems to be doing the same.

Our take

The journalism is solid, that's not the issue. But the neutrality here reads as a deliberate posture rather than an absence of opinion, and it's worth saying so. The evidence assembled is pointed enough to support a real conclusion—one never arrives. The producers quoted run from openly supportive to carefully noncommittal, but nothing pushes back: no skeptical oenologist, no consortium voice with doubts, no consumer who finds any of this unconvincing. Pojer's remarks about secondary pathogens are among the most candid things in the piece and they get minimal space. Tessari's observation—that the market genuinely doesn't know where to put PIWI wines—is the kind of detail that deserves a follow-up question, and doesn't get one. The regulatory picture is hard to look past: Italy is the only major European producer keeping PIWI out of DOC status while its neighbors adjust. That could have warranted a sharper sentence. The data supports it. The article chooses not to go there.

About the author

Giambattista Marchetto has been working across food, wine, travel, and lifestyle journalism for close to thirty years. He contributes regularly to Il Sole 24 Ore, Pambianco, Food & Wine Italia, and Linkiesta Gastronomika, and directs VinoNews24. He also runs Charta Bureau, a consultancy offering strategic communication and marketing services across Italy and Central Europe. That second role matters here and should be stated plainly. A journalist running a paid consultancy for the industry he covers is operating inside a structural conflict of interest—one this article makes no mention of. The writing is polished, the sources are real, and the missing conclusions are almost certainly not an oversight.

About the publisher

Linkiesta is a Milan-based independent digital newspaper founded in 2011, with a shareholder structure capping individual ownership below 5%. Under editor-in-chief Christian Rocca, the publication has moved steadily away from investigative reporting and toward opinion, analysis, and editorial production sold to corporate clients. The PIWI piece runs in Gastronomika, its food and wine section, where editorial content sits alongside sponsored material and industry partnerships. A publication that produces content for the same sector it covers is not operating on neutral ground, whatever the ownership structure is designed to suggest.