Wine Between Climate Crisis, Technology, and Tradition – Sicily as an Open-Air Laboratory

On July 1, 2025, Francesco Spadafora was in his vineyards, 450 metres above sea level, in the Virzì district of western Sicily. Compared to just two weeks earlier, humidity at dawn had collapsed from 98 per cent to minimal levels, while temperatures had already climbed above 30 degrees Celsius by nine in the morning. ‘The leaves had curled in on themselves like never before,’ he recalled, squinting into the blazing midday sun of May. Already as hot as August.

Spadafora is a third-generation organic winemaker and a member of the Italian Federation of Independent Winegrowers. His 180 hectares between Palermo and Alcamo tell the story of a Sicily long accustomed to sun and drought, but unprepared for climatic conditions this extreme. Downy mildew - a vine disease traditionally associated with the humid climates of northern Europe - has now spread into vineyards across southern Italy, one of the most unexpected consequences of this shift. ‘This is one of the clearest effects of climate change, but certainly not the only one,’ Spadafora told FairPlanet.

Two hundred kilometres away, on the plains of Menfi, Filippo Buttafuoco described the same crisis, referring to 2023 as an ‘annus horribilis’. For 25 years he has served as agronomist for Cantine Settesoli and the Mandrarossa label. ‘We had an extremely rainy spring that turned Sicily green like Scotland. Then suddenly came a week of extreme heat, with peaks close to 50 degrees Celsius. Under those conditions the vine can no longer defend itself,’ he said. ‘The real critical issue is not drought itself, but the speed with which the climate swings from one extreme to another.’

A Land Burning, an Economy Trembling

Sicily is one of Italy’s four largest wine-producing regions, with about 100,000 hectares of vineyards. Cooperative wineries such as Settesoli – with 2,000 members and 6,000 hectares – provide income and employment for thousands of families. ‘Behind every bottle there are around 5,000 families involved across the territory,’ Giuseppe Bursi, president of Settesoli, told FairPlanet.

Yet the strength of Sicilian wine is not merely economic. Catarratto, Nero d’Avola, Grillo, Nerello Mascalese, Perricone, Carricante, Zibibbo – indigenous grape varieties selected over centuries by Phoenicians, Greeks, and Arabs – form one of Europe’s richest ampelographic heritages, a genetic wealth built for resilience.

Today, however, that balance is being tested. In 2024, according to a study by World Weather Attribution, the likelihood of extreme drought events in Sicily increased by 50 per cent compared to the pre-industrial era.  About 70 per cent of the region registered severe-to-extreme drought conditions. Water reservoirs at the end of summer 2024 were filled to just 20 per cent capacity. In 2025, Sicily ranked among the Italian regions with the highest number of extreme weather events  – 45 in total. For the wine sector, the challenge is no longer merely productive, but structural.

The challenge is compounded by economic pressures: Sicily’s long dependence on bulk-wine markets has often squeezed margins for smaller producers, while past scandals involving organised crime and EU agricultural funds have periodically cast a shadow over the sector.

The Vineyard Sentinels

To tackle this structural problem, part of the wine community in Sicily has joined forces. Today, small metal structures just over a metre tall are beginning to appear amid the rows of vines: nearly 70 weather stations are being installed across around 1,000 hectares stretching from Mount Etna to the Belìce Valley, continuously monitoring temperature, humidity, leaf wetness, and rainfall, with data flowing into a so-called Decision Support System integrating agronomic models and predictive algorithms. 

Fourteen wineries are involved, all members of the SOStain Sicilia Foundation – founded in 2020 through the initiative of the DOC Sicilia Protection Consortium and Assovini Sicilia, building on a sustainability certification programme active since 2012, and now including 33 certified wineries covering 6,300 hectares and producing 23 million bottles – which promoted the initiative in partnership with INFAGRI and Rural sicily.

‘Drones can be useful for collecting data too, but the key point remains direct observation of the vines. That is where you understand whether they are healthy or suffering. And that is the winegrower’s job,’ Spadafora said.

Buttafuoco embraced the weather stations and built an integrated response system around them. ‘We realised that everything starts with the soil. A soil rich in organic matter retains much more moisture and helps the vine withstand climatic stress more effectively,’ he said. Alongside soil care, practices once considered outdated were making a comeback: grass cover, revised canopy management, and natural treatments such as kaolin clay. ‘Our response to the climate crisis is not a single technology, but a combination of practices,’ Buttafuoco explained. ‘Today a vineyard must be guided day by day.’

Adriano Zago, a biodynamic agronomist, told FairPlanet that ‘a form of viticulture excessively delegated to technology risks weakening the farmer’s observational capacity, which remains the most important skill of all.’ For him, the transformation required is not technological but cultural. ‘Tradition is simply an innovation that succeeded,’ he said. He also pointed to what Sicily could genuinely export as a model: ‘The genetic richness that still exists here is

extraordinary. We have 500 varieties in cultivation and another 500 preserved in conservatories. France has the equivalent divided by ten.’

The Sicilian “semi-miracle” – sitting at the same table

The SOStain Sicilia Foundation’s real wager was highly not simply a technical solution, but community work: bringing together actors who normally would not speak to one another. ‘We have learned how to confront each other, even starting from very different positions,’ Alberto Tasca d’Almerita, president SOStain Sicilia Foundation, told FairPlanet. ‘The goal is not to prevail over one another, but to build shared solutions that work for everyone.’

As he himself explained, the Foundation was composed entirely of volunteers. No employees, no compensation for producers sitting at the table. Funding came from philanthropists, banks, and local organisations. The model gathered companies’ needs from the ground up, transferred them to a multidisciplinary scientific committee, activated research, identified funding opportunities, and developed shared protocols. And – unlike what often happened within wine consortia – it managed to keep together small organic producers and large cooperatives, traditionalists and innovators alike.

While many consortia remained, in Zago’s words, ‘the great absentees of a transformation that had become inevitable,’ SOStain was attempting to occupy that space. ‘The semi-miracle of Sicily,’ as Tasca d’Almerita called it, was the ability to bring together cooperatives with 2,000 members and independent winegrowers with 180 hectares, to confront their crisis collectively.

The Foundation provides a framework through which producers, scientists, institutions, and local organisations can work on common initiatives. Sicilian viticulture is now becoming an open-air laboratory. Not because it has discovered a miraculous technology capable of solving the climate crisis, but because it has developed a promising approach to integrate innovation and tradition without sacrificing either one. Sicily might ultimately export a different expertise altogether – the ability to collaborate, argue, even clash, without losing sight of the common good.

Because the real risk was not that the technology would fail, but the illusion that a sensor could replace the experience of those who, generation after generation, have learned to read the land’s changes long before they appear in the data.