Is it balsamic or balsamic?

Welcome to a very special guest post, written by Colin Hanner for First Press by Dai Dai Studio. Next week, paid subscribers will receive a recipe for summer fruit crisp. As always, thank you for being here! Learn more about my work here and browse past editions here.

Need a cocktail to enjoy while you read? Might I recommend this negroni?

I.

Look up from the fields of Apulia and there is only sun.

Here at the heel of Italy’s boot, the landscape is nothing like the Tuscany of travel posters. There are no cypress-lined hills and no terraced vineyards climbing toward stone farmhouses. This is flat agricultural country, stretching toward the Adriatic in almost every direction, growing olives, tomatoes and over half of Italy’s total table grape production.

These table grapevines in Apulia are trellised high, with big clusters hanging beneath a canopy of leaves, heavy and loose. They are generous in a way that Trebbiano and Sangiovese, the tight-berried wine grapes of Tuscany and Emilia, never are. Big, fat, sweet uva da tavola are thin-skinned, high in water content, grown for eating out of a cold bowl on a hot day. They are unlike uva da vini, the small, thick-skinned, intensely concentrated grapes destined to be something more.

To even an untrained eye, a table grape is not easily mistaken for a wine grape.

But when either is pressed into must — the raw juice that becomes wine or balsamic when cooked down — the two grapes become harder to tell apart.

Balsamic, born in the cellars of Modena and now found in virtually every Western kitchen, is nothing but must. Unlike wine, which uses must as a starting point and then transforms it through fermentation, balsamic is simply cooked must, reduced, concentrated and aged. The quality of the must reflects the quality of the balsamic.

As late as 1987, fewer than 3,000 bottles a year left Modena — the city where the word balsamico first appeared in the ledgers of the Este ducal court in 1747. But by 2002, that number was 100,000. By 2017, 90 million liters were being produced annually, shipped to over 120 countries. By any measure, it had become one of the great success stories of Italian food.

But over three decades of growth, the market had never faced the one question it couldn’t answer: What happens when the harvest fails?

In April 2017, frosts crept into the vineyards at night across much of Italy, forcing farmers throughout Tuscany, Puglia, Umbria and Sicily — among the hardest hit — to light candles and burn hay bales between the rows to save the emerging buds. In July and into August, a heatwave forecasters named Lucifero drove temperatures past 40°C (104°F) for several days across the peninsula, shriveling grapes on the vine before they could be picked. In Puglia, where the balsamic supply chain began, frost had cut the potential crop by as much as a third before the summer even arrived, the heat decimating what remained. Harvests that normally began in September started in July, and by the end of the season, a quarter of the country’s normal output was gone — the worst harvest to hit Italy in more than half a century.

The balsamic market had grown too fast and too far to absorb a harvest failure quietly. Producers under contract to supply supermarkets in a dozen countries faced a choice: tell their buyers there wasn’t enough, or find another way.

So, someone found another way.

In March 2019, less than 18 months removed from harvest, officers from the Nuclei Antisofisticazioni e Sanità — a specialized division of the Carabinieri dedicated to food fraud — fanned out across five regions, executing 21 search warrants at wineries, processing facilities and transport companies as part of Operation Global Wine. The warrants had been ordered by the public prosecutor’s office in Foggia, the city at the heart of the scheme.

What they were tracing was a supply chain assembled to pass off table grapes as wine grapes. According to documents uncovered by NAS, a processing facility in the Foggia area pressed table grapes into must, then moved it through a network of intermediary companies south into Sicily, then back north through Campania and Lazio. A company in Salento performed further adulteration (tampering with the original) before the product continued north, arriving at balsamic producers in Emilia with documents declaring it had been pressed from Trebbiano and Sangiovese. By the end of the searches, investigators had seized €15,000 in cash and 91,000 quintals of counterfeit must and wine products worth €15 million.

Ministero dell'Agricoltura@SocialMasaf

OPERAZIONE #GLOBALWINE | #CENTINAIO: "GARANTITA SICUREZZA E QUALITÀ DELLE ECCELLENZE MADE IN ITALY" "Ringrazio gli ispettori dell'#ICQRF e i #Carabinieri dei #NAS che difendono ogni giorno il buon nome delle nostre produzioni #MadeInItaly." ➡️ goo.gl/pddqi6

5:49 PM · Mar 5, 2019

4 Replies · 22 Reposts · 74 Likes

A year earlier, the Ispettorato Centrale della Qualità e della Repressione Frodi (ICQRF), Italy’s national food fraud inspectorate, and the Guardia di Finanza had already seized more than 13,000 hectoliters of table grape juice being sold as grape must in Puglia. The infrastructure for this fraud, it turned out, had been quietly operating for some time.

For Stefano Vaccari, the head of the ICQRF, the second offense was a sharp wound. “This is not just a health problem,” he said. “The problem is the reputation of products that are made in Italy. This is what we must defend.”

II.

When a product in Italy is suspected of not being what it claims to be, the matter does not remain theoretical.

The NAS operates 38 territorial units across the country, staffed by roughly 1,000 officers who carry both the authority of a health inspector and the powers of the judicial police. They can enter a facility, pull samples, examine documents and make arrests, all in the same visit.

A significant portion of their work concerns food: adulteration, fraud, mislabeling and counterfeit products moving through the supply chain. The same unit that executed 21 search warrants across five regions in the spring of 2019 is also the unit that monitors olive oil, fake Parmigiano Reggiano, and counterfeit Prosciutto di Parma. In Italy, the integrity of what a thing is called is not a marketing question but a matter for armed officers.

Where the NAS operates under the authority of the criminal justice system, the ICQRF functions as a quality watchdog, monitoring whether what is on the label corresponds to what is in the package. Together, the two bodies represent something with no real American equivalent: a permanent, nationwide infrastructure built on the premise that food fraud is not a regulatory nuisance but a crime against culture.

For more than a decade, the effort to defend these products abroad has been coordinated at the highest levels of the Italian state. The Italian Trade Agency operates several offices across the United States, running educational events, trade show campaigns and consumer outreach aimed at a single goal: teaching American buyers to tell the difference between what is Italian and what merely sounds like it.

In 2015, Italy established a Permanent Observatory on Italian Sounding. In 2019, it created a National Council for the Fight Against Counterfeiting and Italian Sounding, which coordinates public agencies and industry groups concerned with imitation of Italian foods. Italian agricultural organizations estimate that the global market for so-called Italian-sounding products — foods marketed with Italian names or imagery despite being produced elsewhere — generates roughly €55 billion annually.

The legal foundation for the existence of bodies like the NAS and ICQRF is a European framework built around a deceptively simple idea: that where something comes from is part of what it is. The EU’s system of geographical indications creates two tiers of protection. A DOP — Denominazione di Origine Protetta, or Protected Designation of Origin — means that every stage of production, from the raw ingredient to the finished product, must occur within a defined geographic area according to strictly regulated methods. A PGI — Indicazione Geografica Protetta, or Protected Geographical Indication — requires that at least one significant stage of production take place in the designated region.

Parmigiano Reggiano is a DOP, as is Prosciutto di Parma. Balsamic vinegar of Modena exists as both: a DOP for the traditional product aged 12 to 25 years, and a PGI for the broader category. Together, Italy holds more geographical indications than any other country in the EU.

The system invites a reasonable objection. If a cheesemaker in Wisconsin has spent 30 years perfecting a hard-aged cheese using traditional methods, why should they be prohibited from calling it Parmesan? If a vinegar producer in Baden has been making a sweet-sour condiment from local wine since 1868 — longer than some Modena producers have been in business — what exactly is Italy protecting, other than market share? The geographical indication system, critics argue, is protectionism dressed as heritage. It reserves premium pricing for incumbents, forecloses competition, and tells producers in other countries that no matter how good their product is, the name belongs to someone else.

But this misreads what a geographical indication actually protects. It is not a brand or a recipe that can be licensed or exported. It is a set of conditions — soil, climate, tradition, accumulated knowledge — that cannot be replicated elsewhere because they did not develop elsewhere.

The Baden producer’s vinegar may be good. It may even be made with care and craft. But it was not made in the attics of Emilia-Romagna, where summer heat and winter cold drive the slow evaporation that concentrates the must year after year. It was not tended by families who have been doing this for five generations, who inherited barrels their great-grandparents filled, who are already filling barrels their grandchildren will empty. And when that product — or something far less carefully made — borrows the name, the flags, the hills, and the language of a place it has nothing to do with, it doesn’t just misrepresent itself. It shapes what a consumer reaches for at a grocery shelf, and what they believe they’re reaching for when they do.

Within the EU, Italy can at least fight on legal grounds (or can try to). In 2015, the IGP consortium took a Baden producer, Balema, to court for labeling its local wine-based vinegar balsamico. The case wound through German courts for years before reaching the European Court of Justice, which ruled in December 2019 that Aceto Balsamico di Modena was protected as a whole, but balsamico alone was just an adjective — generic, not geographic, available to anyone with a barrel and a label. Two years later, Slovenia announced it would standardize its own vinegar production, allowing any wine vinegar mixed with fruit juice to be sold as balsamico.

The word, in both cases, had been hollowed out, with no single body being big enough to stop it.

The challenges are even greater in the United States, one of the largest markets for balsamic vinegar outside Europe. American demand accounts for a substantial share of global imports of Italian balsamic vinegar, according to trade analyses compiled by the Italian Trade Agency and EU agricultural reports. It is also a market where the European Union’s system of geographical indications has no direct legal authority.

A bottle labeled simply “balsamic vinegar” can therefore be produced anywhere so long as its ingredients comply with U.S. labeling regulations, which focus on safety and disclosure rather than regional authenticity. Geographic food names can be protected in the United States through certification marks — the mechanism behind labels like Idaho Potatoes or Florida Oranges — but only when a producer group registers and enforces them through trademark law rather than through a national origin-protection system. In the U.S., a name evokes a place, but the law does not require that the product come from that place.

For years, the authentic product’s greatest obstacle in the American market was visibility. Most consumers had never encountered it and had no reason to seek it out. Now it faces something even more challenging: price.

In February 2026, after a U.S. court ruling struck down key elements of earlier tariffs on European imports, the administration responded by introducing a new 10 percent global tariff on a range of imported goods, including agricultural products, through a separate trade authority. In short a few months, the proceeds from those tariffs are now being refunded back to businesses, though producers will likely be last in line to get back what’s theirs.

Italian agricultural groups were direct about what sustained trade pressure would mean. It would not make imitation products worse, they argued — it would make authentic ones more expensive and scarcer. The country’s largest farmers’ association, Coldiretti, has repeatedly argued that tariffs and trade barriers tend to penalize authentic Italian products while leaving imitation “Italian-sounding” goods largely untouched.

A consumer who might have been persuaded to try the real thing — a 100ml bottle, a gold cap, a price that already requires justification — may now find that bottle costs more, on a shelf where the $3.99 alternative has never been easier to reach.

In Foggia, someone had decided the definition was flexible enough to absorb a substitution — and the machinery of the Italian state ground into motion. The system, imperfect as it was, recognized that something had been misrepresented and moved to correct it.

In the United States, the same substitution requires no network, no intermediaries, no false paperwork. The rolling hills are not evidence of fraud but a design choice. The caramel coloring is not an adulterant but an ingredient. There is no paperwork to falsify because nothing is being claimed that the law requires to be true. The definition is not being stretched here — it was never established in the first place.

See you back here next week for fruit crisp! Thanks for being here.