Farmers and researchers tell of the impact of a rapidly changing climate, and the measures being taken to adapt
Paola Ferraro marches through the neat grids of vines that chequer the slopes of Monfumo and rattles off the number of ways violent weather hurts her family’s prosecco production.
“It feels like there’s no time,” says Ferraro, from Bele Casel winery, whose grandmother lit candles and prayed during once-rare hail storms that have started to hit earlier in the year and pack more of a punch. “It’s changing so fast.”in Nature found that by the end of the century 90% of traditional wine regions could disappear from coastal and lowland parts of Spain, Italy, Greece and southern California.
At the Vinitaly trade fair in Verona, where well-heeled wine dealers swill glasses of their finest, prosecco producers say the sector has only just woken up to the scale of the threat. “The big fear is not: ‘I’m going to wake up and the climate change is so extreme I can’t grow grapes any more’,” says Gambetta. “The fear is that: ‘This product we always made – that everyone always loved – that they don’t like it any more’.”Sipped straight or mixed in a spritz, prosecco has had a boom in popularity over the last two decades, but green groups and some people in northern Italy haveSome farmers have already started to change their practices.
To help farmers save water, Tarolli flies drones over slopes to build 3D models with which he can simulate rainfall patterns. He then uses these to find the best areas to build ponds, which farmers can connect to drip irrigation systems to water drier parts of the vineyard.
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