In Italy’s Drought-Hit Vineyards, the Harvest of a Changing Climate

Climate changes lead us to all sorts of environmental and economic clashes.  Droughts, floods, extreme weather are badgering many continents right now. Much of our current and future technology and investment will need to be directed towards building more resilient industries and communities.  

In Italy’s Drought-Hit Vineyards, the Harvest of a Changing Climate

By JASON HOROWITZ

Donneschi Zvonko, 49, harvesting pinot nero grapes in Neive. Due to the high temperatures this year, the winemaker Castello di Neive has started harvesting the grapes three weeks earlier than usual. Credit Alessandro Penso for The New York Times

A 2016 study by NASA and Harvard of grape harvest dates going back to the 1600s found that climate change pushed harvests forward drastically in France and Switzerland in the second half of the 20th century.

Other studies have suggested that traditional wine-growing regions in Europe and around the world will become too hot for the berries traditionally linked to their earth and climate, or terroir, and will be forced to adopt varietals built for heat.

The vexing possibilities are worthy of contemplation over a fine wine: What is Bordeaux if it becomes inhospitable to cabernet franc or merlot? What is Burgundy without pinot noir? What if southern England supplants Champagne as a home to sparkling wine?

In Italy, a heat wave this year, given the name Lucifer, is blamed for an expedited picking and reduced yields of Franciacorta sparkling wine. Wine production overall is expected to drop up to 15 percent nationwide.

Here in Piedmont, where an ancient ocean enriched the land with minerals and the sun kissed the hills in just the right way, the Italian news media noted with shock the harvesting of grapes for white wine in July.

The local chapter of Coldiretti, the Italian agricultural lobby, noted that the harvest of grapes for Barolo, which often used to reach into November, now took place weeks earlier.

“People are picking grapes in their bathing suits, and they used to be in gloves and overcoats!” local wine enthusiast Piero Comino, 63, said over a straw-colored glass of arneis in Neive.

On the hills under the Castello di Neive, six workers moved in pairs in mid-August, expertly cutting bunches of pinot nero grapes and dropping them in plastic red crates. A week earlier, they had already cleared an adjacent vineyard of the delicate grapes used to make their bubbly Spumante.

“It’s 20 days earlier on average due to climate change,” Ion Bruno, 50, a worker who has been picking the grapes for the last three decades, said as he clipped a stem.

Drought, more than heat, threatens the grapes, he said, adding that instead of steady rainfall, precipitation now comes in downpours that run off the hillsides and do little to slake the thirst of the vines.

“Decades ago there would be snow on the ground in November,” said his partner Bruno Novelli, 58, as they moved to a new vine. “And now it doesn’t snow anymore.”

Those changes require careful management from winemakers, several of whom said that, if correctly harnessed, the heat could improve their product.

Claudio Roggero, who as enologist at the Castello di Neive, decides, among other things, when to pick the grapes, strolled with satisfaction through the corridors of vines, saying the grapes looked perfect.

“If I left these grapes another week they could have been like this,” he said stopping in front of a rare sunburned bunch. “It’s very dangerous.”

In the middle of August, a thermometer planted in one of their vineyards showed heat in excess of 104 degrees Fahrenheit. “It went off the charts,” the wine estate’s owner, Italo Stupino, 81, said as he looked over the hills.

Mr. Stupino also pointed at vineyards destroyed by a hailstorm in April, and yet he expressed doubt that global warming drove the change.

“I believe it up to a certain point,” he said with a shrug. “The temperature goes up and down. We had hail in April, and I remember some hot, hot Augusts as a boy.”

That sentiment ran through the hills.

In Monforte d’Alba, just outside the town square, Giovanni Rocca stepped out onto his hills and happily chewed a grape he picked from his vineyard.

“The grapes are beautiful, the heat’s good for them,” he said, arguing that the vintage, which he said would probably come 10 or 15 days earlier than usual, was likely to yield a lower-quantity but higher-quality Barolo.

His son, Maurizio, 37, also spoke of the benefits of the sunshine. But he added that temperatures above 100 degrees “are not good for the wine; the berries become unbalanced and too fat, with too high an alcohol content.”

He said that they knew how to deal with anomalies, but that if intense heat waves became permanent, “We’ll have to plant bananas and pineapples.”

That, of course, would be a tragedy to the world’s wine connoisseurs, who have come to worship this region’s Barolos and Barbarescos, nebbiolos and barberas. The wine has also been good to its best producers.

An enclosed observation deck hangs like a giant helicopter cockpit over the hills of Alba at the headquarters of the Ceretto family, which produces nearly a million bottles a year.

The company’s employees will be out in the fields a week earlier than usual to pick arneis grapes for its wildly popular Blangé white wine, said Roberta Ceretto, 44.

But she was mostly unbothered by the heat, saying that while her employees might not be able to go on vacation in August in the future, the quality and culture of the area’s wines would survive.

“The dinosaurs didn’t go extinct in 20 years,” she said with a smile.

Not everyone is so optimistic.

In Barbaresco’s wine store, set up in a deconsecrated church, Michela Adriano, a young winemaker, said that while some skeptics thought 2017 would be recalled as the vintage of climate change hysteria, some leading winemakers were thinking hard about how to adapt to the new abnormal.

Angelo Gaja, perhaps the area’s most famous producer, has spoken often about the potential consequences of climate change on the area and its wines, Ms. Adriano noted.

And Mr. Reverdito, who has hung green nets to protect his own nebbiolo grapes from hail, said the nets had the added benefit of reducing damage from the scorching sun.

He exuded the same passion for his wines — comparing them at times to beautiful women — as other small producers in the surrounding hills.

But he feared that the lack of interplay of warm days and cool nights, of summer and autumn, threatened to overproduce the sugar and alcohol of a Barolo wine that should be elegantly composed, like “a symphony.”

“There is no more balance,” he said, lamenting the vanishing of the seasons. “And this is a disaster for us.”