Chianti. That's the name of the most famous wine in the world. Everyone once knew that Chianti came from Tuscany, that it was bottled in reed-wrapped belly bottles, and that it was a fruity, cheerful drop for light-hearted dining moments. These certainties have been permanently shattered over the last thirty years. First, the Chianti became thinner and thinner and more and more sour, then the Tuscans smashed the bulbous bottle called Fiasco. And again and again, one hears that the Chianti label is also stuck on non-Tuscan wine by unscrupulous bottlers. Merum shows how the Chianti is mercilessly grounded by large bottlers and distributors.
Germans love Chianti. Every year they polish off 25 million bottles. But apparently, they are not willing to pay much for their favorite wine. The discount giant Aldi is convinced that the pain threshold of its customers is two euro and has been offering Chianti at this dumping price for more than two years. Which would not be scandalous if the price for Chianti in Tuscany had not exactly doubled during the same period!
Something can't be right, someone is putting money on it: The discounters? The suppliers? Or is it just the customers who are being ripped off again for the sake of simplicity?
In fact, in order for the calculation of suppliers, importers and discounters to work out, the guilelessness of the consumer and the definition of what "Chianti" has to be have to be strained: While between mid-1999 and mid-2000 - Chianti barrel wine prices were at their absolute lowest - golden noses could be earned with the Chianti business, the margins became tighter and tighter from autumn 2000 on. The price the bottlers then had to pay for a liter of Chianti in summer 2001 was exactly twice as high as twelve months before.
Even with a lot of goodwill, it cannot be explained how a bottle of Chianti DOCG, which costs the bottler two euro in Italy, can also be offered for two euro on German shelves.
The Italian financial police, too, did not find a plausible explanation for this generosity of the German discounters and their Italian suppliers and paid a visit to the well-known Castellani bottler and Aldi supplier in the province of Pisa in a large squad.
Chianti president Luca Giannozzi: "It's impossible that the people in charge of the German food trade don't realize that they don't get real Chianti for these prices"
Roberto Castellani denies any blame and explains the intervention of the "Guardia_di_Finanza" as follows: "Since we are in the period of contract renewals, our unscrupulous Italian competitors have invented a story that doesn't exist. In doing so, they tried to put a routine inspection, which is carried out every year at the end of the harvest by officials of the tax authorities, in the wrong light."
However, the "unscrupulous" competition cannot be blamed for the "routine inspection" - according to Castellani's own statement, it took "only" eight days. Those who, like Castellani and consorts, deliver huge amounts of wine at impossible prices, have to expect to attract the attention of the control organs even without any external help: At the beginning of 2000, the minimum production price of a 0.75 liter bottle of Chianti for the Tuscan bottler was 1.30 euro; due to the increase of cask wine prices, this cost price increased rapidly and relentlessly to rise to the current 1.90 euro per bottle.
Today, no one who has to buy wine, bottles, corks, cartons, and labels can produce a bottle of Chianti for less than 1.90 euro. If he then wants to earn ten cents, he can offer a bottle for two euro at best.
If you add another ten cents for the transport to Germany, the cheapest of all cheap Chianti costs the discounter - before importer commissions - 2.10 Euros. Undeterred, however, Aldi offers Chianti DOCG - or what it is called - for 1.99 euro.