Italy fresh produce export calendar

Harvest in October and November out of Lazio, Piedmont and the Veneto; shipping and selling from storage until about May. This is the row that makes the New Zealand and Chilean windows worth what they are worth — those origins arrive into the months when Italian fruit has run out.

Read the two halves as one market rather than two calendars. When the Italian crop is short, the Southern Hemisphere programme sailing six months later is repriced before it is picked.

Harvest from August to October in South Tyrol and Trentino, then out of controlled-atmosphere storage until the following summer. Like every other apple row in this section, the window is a selling programme rather than a harvest.

What distinguishes the Italian one is that it is sold on variety and on grade rather than on price — the club varieties and the Val Venosta and Val di Non brands are the point. That puts it at the opposite end of the same market from Poland, and it is why the two origins can run identical windows without ever competing for the same order.

Roughly July to November out of Puglia and Sicily, peaking in late summer. It fills the months between the end of the Southern Hemisphere programmes and the point where Egyptian and Turkish supply has finished.

Almost all of it goes to Europe by truck, so for most buyers this is the row that explains a price rather than a row you would book against. The exception is the volume going to the Gulf and the Far East, where Italian grapes compete directly with Egypt on a lane of similar length.

Roughly November to April out of Sicily and Calabria. The blood oranges — Tarocco, Moro, Sanguinello — are the part of this window nobody else supplies in volume, and they are grown where they are because the temperature swing on the slopes around Etna is what colours them.

That makes it a variety trade rather than a citrus trade. A buyer sourcing blood oranges has one serious origin and a short window, which is the opposite of the position they are in on navels, where Spain, Egypt, South Africa and California are all quoting.