According to a recent report by Reuters and estimates released by the International Organisation of Vine and Wine, France is set to overtake Italy to reclaim its title as the world’s top wine producer this year.

The OIV predicts that French production will reach 50 million hectolitres this year, while Italy’s output will fall by 13 per cent to 42 million, its lowest in years.

France’s increased production was fuelled by favourable weather conditions and is forecast to rise by about nine per cent, allowing it to regain the crown it lost to its southern European neighbour Italy four years ago.

While in Italy a report by the Italian enologists’ body Assoenologi stated that Italy has possibly had “the scarcest harvest in the past 60 years. To find a similar quantity we should go back to 1948 when 40.4 million hectolitres (4.04 billion litres) were produced”, the report said.

The output also fell because Italian growers, especially in the southern regions of Sicily and Puglia as well as northern region of Emilia Romagna, had dug up vines encouraged by the EU, the report said. About 9,300 hectares of vineyards were destroyed under an EU programme in 2010, on top of more than 22,000 ha which were dug up in 2008 and 2009, it said.

The EU programme, which started in August 2008, offers cash to less competitive winemakers to dig up vines to cut back output aiming to drain Europe’s “wine lakes” and remove 175,000 ha of land under vines out of the EU’s total of 3.6 million ha.

Italian growers’ increased efforts to prune grapes to improve quality also helped to reduce quantity, the report said.

During the past years French vintners have suffered several years of bad weather, resulting in unusually low yields.

However, the assistant to the President of the CCVF, a group of wine cooperatives across France insisted it would not mean lower quality wines adding: “It didn’t degrade the quality, as these are volumes we’re used to treating,” she said.

The OIV expects global production to remain stable, despite an overall drop in vineyard surface area, but the organisation was uncertain about the direction of wine consumption, which fell in 2008 and 2009 and rose a little in 2010.