Five Degrees Hotter

Somebody had the idea of putting shade netting over one row.

It's a reasonable idea. The summers here have become something the vines never agreed to. Leaves burn. Fruit cooks on the south side before the seeds are ready. So you stretch a net across the top and give the plant some relief.

They measured it. The temperature under the net went up by about five degrees.

The net stopped the air moving. Whatever heat got in stayed in. They had built a small greenhouse over a row of vines in the hottest summer anyone could remember, on a sound hypothesis, with good intentions.

Nobody is embarrassed about this. They tell me before I ask.

Further along there's a worse problem. Yellow leaves on the Barbera, young plants dying, and flavescence dorée moving through in a way that means those vines come out and don't go back. No experiment attached to that one. You just remove them.

Parked by the shed there's a small remote-controlled tractor on trial, sent up from Bologna. The theory is that a lighter machine presses the soil down less. Nobody knows yet.

Three things in one vineyard on one afternoon. One failed. One is being managed. One is unproven.

This is what adapting looks like from inside a vineyard. A row with a net on it that made everything worse, and somebody writing down by exactly how much.

Conterno Fantino farms 27 hectares in Monforte d'Alba, including holdings in the Ginestra cru. Flavescence dorée is a quarantine vine disease in the EU. Infected plants must be removed.