This report, from the Italian glass packaging association, Assovetro, reports on the glass bottle market and customer preferences in Italy. It is a question of reliability, but also one of taste, where 73% of wine made and 92% of wine packaged in Italy comes in a glass bottle and when 9 out of 10 customers prefer wine in a glass bottle. Its characteristics mean that glass is able to retain both the flavour and the sensory qualities of the wine. There is furthermore a tendency to associate the image of the use of glass packaging with prestigious products, those always to be appreciated and savoured, particularly on special occasions. Some 79% of Europeans say they would opt for glass for serving drinks (including mineral water) on special occasions, with this number reaching 83% in Italy. This unbreakable marriage between glass and wine is supported by the numbers too: Against the background of 2010 growth in the wind industry and thanks to a boom in exports, 1.6BN bottles of wine were exported, this being accompanied by similar growth in the volume of glass bottles produced in Italy which, in 2010, grew by 9.3% to reach a level of 3,118,593/tons. Data for 2011, a period of economic difficulty, is also positive for Italian wines, particularly on the export front, where exports for the first half of 2011 show a 14.1% volume increase on the first half of 2010, an increase which is also serving to drive the production of glass bottles.
