When was the last time you drank an Italian wine made by a co-op? The truth is, you may not even have known it. Many co-op wines reach UK consumers through supermarket own-labels, leaving the producer invisible to buyers, while others don't usually use the word “cooperative” on the label.
Co-ops, at their simplest, are a wine-producing model in which growers, big and small, pool their resources and collectively own a winemaking facility. They usually hire winemakers and viticultural consultants, with profits shared among grower members. As they typically cover a larger vineyard area than an estate producer, they also operate at a very different scale.
With that scale often comes a prejudice about co-op wines being cheap and mass-produced. In Italy, as Vincenzo Aleterna, export manager of Cantine Birgi in Sicily, points out, trade professionals in the domestic market are even more biased towards co-op wines than those in the UK market.
Regine Lee MW, managing director at Indigo Wine, agrees, to an extent. Lee says co-ops are recognised in the UK for offering “great value for money”, particularly at entry level, but can suffer from a “gap in their storytelling” compared with family-owned estates. Above £12 to £15 trade price, she says, buyers want differentiation and a good reason for the wine to be on the list.
Sheer scale of Italian co-ops
Yet co-ops account for a significant share of Italian wine in the UK. Giusy Andreacchio, a wine educator who organised and presented the Italian co-op-focused masterclass in London in June, estimates that around £300 million of the £860 million worth of Italian wine sold in the UK last year can be traced back to co-ops. Italian co-ops now process around 60% of the country's grapes, with 459 co-ops representing some 136,000 grower-members and generating approximately €6.4 billion in turnover.
But scale does not automatically translate into commercial success. As Robert Joseph points out, many European co-ops are in financial crisis. While some dynamic co-ops are doing very well, he argues that the sector needs to become more commercially competitive.
Look beyond the anonymous labels, however, and the strongest case for co-ops' differentiation may in fact come from sustainability in its full sense: climate resilience, economic viability for growers and social stability in rural communities. Crucially, the three reinforce each other.
Bigger the better?
At Vinchio Vaglio in Piedmont, managing director Marco Giordano argues that large scale is in fact an advantage. Vinchio Vaglio farms more than 600 hectares across multiple sites, giving it a diversity of exposures, elevations, soils and microclimates. As Giordano puts it: “We are bigger, but this is also our strength.”
That diversity becomes increasingly valuable as climate change makes vintages more unpredictable. A vineyard position that is “wonderful” one year can suffer from too much sun the next, Giordano explains. With hundreds of hectares to draw from, the co-op can choose different plots each year according to the conditions. In this sense, scale becomes a form of climate insurance.
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