The consortium of Brunello di Montalcino producers will no longer be responsible for controlling the authenticity of one of Italy's finest wines, the agriculture ministry said on Monday.
The action came in the wake of revelations that some producers were blending their Brunello with wine made from Sangiovese grapes grown outside of the township of Montalcino in Tuscany.
The ministry added that it had appointed a special panel of three experts to verify whether Brunello was correctly produced and, if not, to propose actions which would ensure the full respect of regulations governing the production of the wine. Rumors that the quality product may have been adulterated led the United States Treasury Department's Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB) to threaten to block all American imports of the wine.
The ban was to have gone into effect on Monday but was pushed back to June 23 to allow time for American and Italian authorities to find a solution.
According to the TTB, ''the case of Brunello wine is one of defrauding the American consumer'' if it is not 100% made from Sangiovese grown in Montalcino.
American Agriculture Secretary Ed Schafer said last week that ''the Brunello problem is not about health, it's about labeling. Let's hope we can resolve this quickly''.
A TTB delegation arrived in Rome at the weekend for talks with officials at the agriculture ministry and will travel to Tuscany later this week to meet with the consortium of Brunello producers. The Brunello consortium had been responsible for verifying the authenticity of the Super Tuscan since 2004, when it was entrusted with the task by the agriculture ministry. This job will now be the responsibility of a new guarantee committee made up of Riccardo Ricci Curbastro, the head of the national federation of quality wine producers Federdoc; Vasco Boatto, an agronomy professor at the University of Padua and an expert in winemaking; and Fulvio Mattivi, who runs the analysis laboratory at the Istituto San Michele all'Adige near Trento.
Speculation that some producers had blended their Brunello with southern wines began to surface on the Web in March and led the Brunello consortium to open an internal probe into what is defined as ''extremely serious accusations''.
Prosecutors in Siena started their own investigation which focused on 13 out of some 250 Brunello producers and led to vintage 2003 bottles from four leading producers being impounded The four were Antinori, Frescobaldi, Argiano and Castello Banfi.
Brunello di Montalcino is perhaps Italy's finest wine and certainly among the best in the world.
Its popularity has been rising steadily in the US which, despite a weak dollar, consumed some 45% of all quality wine produced in Tuscany last year and 25% of the Brunello which is put on the market.
With a turnover of over 120 million euros and seven million bottles sold a year, Brunello has become the symbol of Italian wine abroad.
