Everything is ready for the annual premier presentation of Vino Novello which for the first time will take place at the Verona trade fair grounds.
For the past 20 years the Italian cousin of the better known French Beaujolais Nouveau has made its debut in Vicenza at the Salone Novello, the only trade fair dedicated to Italian new wine.
The presentation is now in the hands of the Verona trade fair agency VeronaFiera, which also organizes Vinitaly, Italy's most important trade fair for wine and distilled spirits.
Re-named 'Anteprima Novello', the will take place Tuesday night at a gala dinner here which will see the participation of Italian Agriculture Minister Luca Zaia.
Novello, Zaia observed recently, ''is the Italian answer to what was once a totally French phenomenon: Beaujolais''.
''We believe that the quality of our product is proved by the fact that the making of Novello is not just limited to one region but takes place from north to south in scores of vineyards of different sizes,'' the minister added.
Starting Wednesday, the Verona fair grounds will host a two-day exhibition of this year's Novello production which will be open to the public but will also cater to wholesalers, retailers, the leading distribution centers and restaurant operators.
Vino Novello, which was officially recognised in 1987, traditionally makes it debut in the first week in November in order to get a jump on Beaujolais Nouveau.
Beaujolais cannot be opened until the third Thursday of November, this year November 20.
Although connoisseurs have traditionally snubbed it, a recent poll taken by the specialised WineNews website found that 38% of wine enthusiasts said that buying a bottle of Novello had become an ''autumn treat'' and 42% said that Novello was ''a wine curiosity to be tasted once a year''.
The popularity of Novello, especially among young people, is for the most part thanks to its clear red color, fruity taste and low alcoholic content, only 11%.
The WineNews said that 26% of the 1,290 people who answered their claimed to like Novello 'a lot' and 41% said it was best consumed together with roast chestnuts, while 22% liked the new wine with pizza and 20% with cold cuts.
Nevertheless, almost half of those responding to the poll said Novello ''failed to express the quality of the land'' where it was produced and a whopping 73% said there were too many varieties of Novello on the shelves.
Only 0.18% of Italy's wine production is now dedicated to making Novello, the popularity of which appears to have peaked in 2004 when 22 million bottles were produced, compared to some 15 million this year.
The number of vineyards producing Novello has also dropped, falling from over 400 in 2004 to 246 this year, and in four years turnover has declined from almost 100 million euros in 2004 to an expected 52.5 million euros in 2008.
Novello, like Beaujolais Nouveau, is a light, fruity red wine which by law must be bottled within a year of the harvest, but in practice is bottled within a few weeks.
The fruity flavour of new wine is in part due to the fact that the juice of the grapes is not left too long with the grape skins which contain the chemical tannin.
This allows winemakers to blend several types of grapes and the wine can even be served chilled like white wines.
One of the main differences between Novello and Beaujolais is that several of the Italian wines retain some of the carbonation used to accelerate the fermentation process while the French Nouveau is traditionally flat.
The tradition of producing new wine began in the Beaujolais area of France's Burgundy region during the 1950s and caught on in Italy at the start of the current last decade.
