The year 2020, marked by the covid-19 pandemic, brought with it great instability and future uncertainty. Facing this problem, the producers made a contingency plan that was applied in the field and in the winery, since the beginning of the outbreak. This year the harvests started, roughly, a week earlier and of the more than 250 existing producers in Alentejo, 27 are already harvesting.

The producers are now doing more training on hygiene and care at this time of the grape harvest. In the cellar there are collaborators dealing with the disinfection of materials and space. And in the field, whoever picks the grapes, walks with a mask.

The Alentejo Regional Winegrowing Commission (CVRA) spoke to producers who estimate a quantity of grapes at last year's level. However, some had to sell half of their production because of the drop in the number of sales due to the problem of the epidemic. In general, we can say that Covid-19 changed some of the ways in which economic agents were used to working, but in the countryside life continues and so does hope.

With regard to wine production, the Institute of Vine and Wine (IVV) estimates that production in the country should decrease by about 3% compared to the previous campaign, corresponding to a drop of 2% compared to the average of the last five campaigns.

In the Alentejo region, the forecast produced in early July by the Porto Sciences University of points to to an increase of 5%, noting that in recent years the region has been in countercyclical, compared to the other national regions.

For the president of CVRA, Francisco Mateus, this year the situation is reversed. "I hope that this will materialize and that we will have a slightly higher production than last year, to compensate for the losses that we have had in the last 5 years", he says.