ABSTRACT
The analysis of viticulture, wine market and consumption around the world presented in Chapter 1 and summarized in Fig. 1-1 in terms of trends, shows that Europe has a traditional and strong viticulture and as such still maintains the largest vineyard areas, together with the largest wine exports and imports. European consumers still account for most of the worldwide consumption (Fig. 14-1). However, countries like North America and China will perhaps compete for this last point in the future. The only exception in the grapevine-related market is for fresh/dried berries consumption, where Europe lies just behind Asia (https://faostat.fao.org/; data not shown). During the last 60 years however, the vineyard areas have decreased roughly by one-third across Europe with a reorientation towards wine quality: low quality varieties have been replaced by high-quality ones and low quality terroirs have been abandoned. After the genetic diversity bottleneck caused in the European viticulture by the introduction of Phylloxera and fungal
Figure 14-1 World statistics for the wine sector (from FAOSTAT; https://faostat.fao.org/) (A) Surface harvested (ha) (B) Wine imports (1000 $). (C) Wine exports in (1000$) (D) Wine consumption (t).
