I follow with great passion the lively debate on climate change in Il Centro, which grew out of my bitter article about yet another sh*tty harvest. Yet I must confess that among all the proposed solutions, I find no emotional relief whatsoever.
My thoughts started with a single question: how long can a winegrower or farmer continue to pursue endless individualistic strategies for survival and adaptation to a changing climate that has clearly been underway for years and is no longer extraordinary?
I borrowed the concept of “therapeutic culture” from Giulia Bergamaschi, author of La terapia non ci salverà (Therapy Won’t Save Us), to explain how—after years of mental conditioning by the mainstream mantra “where there’s a will, there’s a way”—it has become obvious to me that every individual effort hits a wall against a problem that has taken on a structural nature.
If the problem is structural and political, it requires a structural and political response.
In a single week, I have learned a great deal: we can apply zeolite to the vines, increase soil organic matter through sustainable farming practices, build private reservoirs on our land, or all pack up and move to the mountains. While these are all valid individual adaptation strategies, none of them answers my original question: how do we save an entire sector from climate change?
I am the first to have practiced certified sustainable viticulture for fifteen years. It is true that adopting good agricultural practices—such as winter cover crops using legumes, reduced tillage, and increasing organic matter—helps retain soil moisture. Yet drought, it must be acknowledged, is surprisingly impartial: it hits organic, biodynamic, sustainable, and conventional growers alike.
It is one thing to hold onto the moisture already in the soil—making clay-rich hillside soils fashionable again, especially under sustainable management—and quite another to access water when there is none. Meanwhile, I keep reading suggestions that we should all move to the mountains.
Perhaps ten years from now, we will indeed be having this conversation from my high-altitude vineyards. Experimenting with new areas is intriguing, but let us not call it a “return to the past.” Which past? That of medieval monks growing vines inside monastery gardens?
Abruzzo certainly has high-elevation land that is highly suitable for viticulture, but these are specific pockets; not all mountain terrain has the right characteristics for growing vines. Furthermore, while an individual farm can choose to move uphill, to be intellectually honest, do we truly believe this can solve a structural crisis for a wine sector built over the last two centuries on the hills between the sea and the mountains?
So, I read the invitation for all of us to relocate to an altitude of 800 meters with a bitter smile.
Abruzzo’s hillside viticulture is not merely rows of vines and pergolas. It is an interconnected system of infrastructure, wineries, landscapes, territories, communities, and people. Do we really want a system where the only survivors are those who can afford to build a private reservoir or buy another ten hectares at 800 meters? That is not collective adaptation; it is economic Darwinism.
All of this is happening while the sector faces another structural hurdle: overproduction, an issue affecting not only Abruzzo or Italy, but much of European viticulture. This is precisely why I struggle to accept that the answer should be a form of natural selection—an agricultural mors tua, vita mea where survival belongs solely to those with more land, more capital, more water, or the means to relocate.
Instead, the true core issue is water as a shared public resource.
We talk about reservoirs, but it always comes back to the same point: without regional and national governance, an individual farmer can accomplish very little. Not every farmer has enough land to build a lake, nor the financial capital to fund it. Yet in agriculture, survival inescapably depends on water management.
I say management because the paradox of Abruzzo is precisely this: we possess vast water resources, yet we continually lose them through infrastructure that—quite literally—is leaking everywhere. This is a textbook case where individuals cannot act alone; our institutions must step up with vision and planning before all available water is swallowed up by data centers.
Our policymakers must start asking themselves who will cultivate these vines in the future. The answer to that question will shape the identity of Italy over the next twenty years. Under current conditions, these hills as we know them are destined to change profoundly, if not disappear entirely as an agricultural landscape.
When a farm disappears, we do not just lose a piece of cultivated land. We lose the rural economy, biodiversity, and community. We lose far more than just wine.
