The Ceev (European Wine Confederation) is calling on the European Commission and the European Parliament to work together, in order to find an agreed interpretation on QR-code identification. Bottle labels must in fact display nutritional values and the list of ingredients, which can be accessed by consumers via a QR-code printed on the labels themselves. A novelty that has an impact on costs for companies and that has already found particular attention from the Minister of Agriculture Francesco Lollobrigida, who has established a three-month derogation for wineries to comply with EU regulations.
In fact, companies in the Italian wine sector had already been complying with the European Commission's demands for some time, printing millions of labels for the current wine year. However, on 24 November, just a few days before the Regulation came into force, the Commission had published new faqs that made most of the labels already printed unusable. Hence the Ministry's intervention to allow wineries to use what they have in stock, as requested by Federvini.