News

New legislation aims to boost winemaking sector

The gov­ern­ment is to go ahead with leg­is­la­tion gov­ern­ing the wine­mak­ing sec­tor orig­i­nally put for­ward under the pre­vi­ous ex­ec­u­tive. The aim is to bring Cata­lan leg­is­la­tion from 2002 into line with Eu­ro­pean law and im­prove the com­pet­i­tive­ness of Cata­lan wines, pro­mote their di­ver­sity and qual­ity, im­prove safety, and boost their in­ter­na­tional rep­u­ta­tion. With the new reg­u­la­tions re­ceiv­ing full ap­proval, they could come into force at the start of 2019.

Apart from al­low­ing the sec­tor to adapt to Eu­ro­pean norms and im­prov­ing the legal pro­tec­tion of wine pro­duc­ers, the new leg­is­la­tion in­cludes a cat­a­logue of grape va­ri­eties grown in Cat­alo­nia for wines with pro­tected des­ig­na­tion of ori­gin or pro­tected ge­o­graph­i­cal in­di­ca­tion .

There are cur­rently 52,000 hectares of vine­yards in Cat­alo­nia and the gov­ern­ment aims to pro­vide the sec­tor with the sup­port needed to con­tinue the trend of the last few years to­wards pro­duc­ing qual­ity wines.

In 2015, some 441,000 kilos of grapes for wine pro­duc­tion were har­vested in Cat­alo­nia. The im­por­tance of the wine sec­tor for GDP is un­de­ni­able, while ex­ports con­tinue to grow. How­ever, the sec­tor needs to up­date it­self and fall into line with the de­mands of the Com­mon Mar­ket Or­ga­ni­za­tion (CMO) for wine.

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