I am under my beach umbrella, right in front of my mother, who is understandably huffing with embarrassment at my social media vulgarity, where I express myself so foully about the ongoing harvest.
Shortly after, I receive a long message from Donatella, who manages my social media channels. Jolted off her sunbed during her well-deserved vacation, she tries to explain that it might be better to avoid being quite so “honest.” Otherwise, by transitive property, people won’t help but think that a sh. harvest will inevitably lead to sh. wines.
Fernando tells me I should call it a Vendemmia Desmoralizante (a demoralizing harvest). The word “sh.”, he says, makes me lose all my elegance.
And so, as I start feeling a bit like sh. myself, with a paranoid-depressive spiral threatening to ruin my August 15th holiday, I decide to try and explain myself better.
I don’t think a perfect harvest exists, even though, if you read the newspapers, almost every harvest has been one in recent years.
Except for 2023—where the damage was of such magnitude that it couldn’t even be sugarcoated with the tall tale of a compensatory, alleged extreme quality in the grapes that miraculously survived on the vine—every other year seems to be hailed as the harvest of the century.
Even the years when climate change showed us its full force were described in glowing terms by the press. Thus, 2018—a tropical and hyper-abundant harvest—became in the papers “Italy surpasses France in grape production.” And 2024—a scorching, severely reduced harvest—was framed as a harvest on the decline, “but the lack of quantity is offset by the pristine health of the grapes.”
The daily reality of a grape grower is never that thrilling.
When I started working at the winery, it was 2002. In 2000, my father had planted a new vineyard in Pianella: a beautiful Abruzzo pergola facing the lake, deeply shaded. My first real harvest was 2003—the first vintage that, at least for me, kicked off the century of climate change with extreme heat and a drought that dragged on from May through September.
The harvests that followed kept expressing the traits of the 1990s—years when, unlike today, problems stemmed more from excessive rainfall, especially in autumn, rather than long periods of extreme drought. These were the years when the trellis system (spalliera) gained ground for that very reason: unlike the pergola, it brought air and sun during humid, rot-prone years.
Years like 2004, when, in our clay-heavy Montepulciano pergola plots, late October rain spells always meant rot. When the ground retains too much water, our red grapes swell up, and the berries mush together.
I remember 2008 the same way: workers trudging through the mud, picking less-than-healthy grapes in the rain. Those grapes produced the last tanks of bulk wine at Cantina del Riccio in Ortona, which wasn’t technologically equipped to “fix” difficult musts. Selling those tanks on the market was an uphill battle that made me realize it was time to change direction and stop producing bulk wine altogether.
Those were the years I decided to replant 10 hectares with trellises to achieve a balanced production system (50% old pergolas, 50% new trellises) capable of mitigating climate extremes in either direction.
After that, the shift between extreme heat years and old-school years grew more frequent. 2011, 2015, and 2017 were distinctly dry.
2018 gifted us new tropical insects and a monsoonal harvest.
I remember 2019 as the last somewhat balanced harvest. Starting in 2020, the moderate alternation between regular vintages and occasional extreme ones came to an end. Then came the 2023/2024 double blow, which slaughtered 70% and 50% of the crop: downy mildew the first year, drought the second.
By late 2024, I hit a deep personal crisis and began questioning the future of this family winegrowing enterprise. I carry it forward with a sense of mission, but every year it forces me to face a doubt I’d rather brush aside—a whisper in my conscience: How much longer will it be possible to do this job?
The uncertainty climate change imposes on me as a grower is a source of genuine stress—one I share with fellow winemakers whose business economies rely entirely on their own grapes.
Yet it isn’t easy to talk about. The wine world is viewed as a privileged one, and any producer who points out the hardships is automatically written off as a chronic whiner complaining from an ivory tower.
And yet, the struggle to see a future for our wineries is real and concrete. There is no point pretending every passing harvest is the harvest of the century. Because they aren’t.
Over the mid-August holiday, I read a wonderful book: La Terapia non ci salverà (Therapy Won’t Save Us) by Giulia Bergamaschi. I saw myself steeped in that therapy culture she describes, which has taken hold over the last 20 years. The ethos of “where there’s a will, there’s a way,” “fake it until you make it,” and that “magical voluntarism” where, with the help of your therapist or consultant, you can change the world you are ultimately responsible for.
It’s a culture that has made the self the only source of liberation, shifting the blame for structural suffering—and the burden of fixing it—entirely onto the individual. Everything depends on you. It has a massive, depoliticizing side effect: it sanctifies personal guilt, resentment, and even hatred toward others in today’s winner-take-all climate.
As Bergamaschi writes, “One of the conditions that allows certain forms of power to persist is our very exhaustion: the mental and emotional fatigue that leaves us without the energy to care for one another, to organize, or to imagine that things could be different.”
And so, yet another dysfunctional harvest arrives to remind you that not everything depends on you. There are collective problems that a single person cannot be expected to solve alone.
My critique is about the conditions under which we are forced to farm today. It is the bitterness of an uncertain future over which you have no agency; it is the frustration of hearing foolish climate denialism every day alongside a complete absence of meaningful policy.
I am not saying we will necessarily end up with bad wines in the glass. A grower’s strength lies in managing production choices based on the health and quality of the grapes brought into the cellar. I grow the grapes, so I can select, sacrifice volume, choose what enters the winery, separate plots, timing, and defend the wine’s quality.
But for how much longer, I ask myself, will it be possible to grow vines here when our business economy, our people, and our families rest on something that becomes more unpredictable with every passing year?
That is what I mean by a sh. harvest. It isn’t a verdict on the wine to come, but on the conditions under which I am forced to produce it today.
So, my dear mother, Fernando, and Donatella: I promise to be more elegant in the future and use the term “discouraging”. But you will forgive me if a “SH. HARVEST” still feels like the most accurate term of all.
