Can Vines Survive in Drought Conditions?

Reporting on a conference about irrigation and water

Arianna Occhipinti has fire in her belly as she prowls around the stage at the Arlberg Weinberg conference in the ski resort of Lech, Austria. She paints a shocking picture of the effect that the climate emergency has had in her native Sicily.

In August 2021, Sicily recorded Europe’s highest ever temperature – 48.8C. In 2024, Arianna’s vineyards had to manage with a scant 160mm rainfall during the entire growing season. The local government declared a state of emergency in early 2024 after the last six months of 2023 resulted in drought conditions. Experts predict that by 2030, 30% of the island of Sicily will be desert. It’s a grim portrayal, but then she gives us hope.

“We survived because of the work we’ve done in our vineyards over the last 20 years” she says. “it’s important to find solutions now and not in the future. We can only monitor climate change, we can’t influence it, but the actions we can do or not do depend on us.”

Before she took to the podium, Dr Jamie Goode gave us some background on why water is so important for vines, and how they process it. Professor Alain Deloire - a renowned French viticultural and agronomy consultant - then gave us the scientific chapter and verse on how to cope with dry conditions. His message was essentially that vines cannot survive without water, thus irrigation is the only solution. He showed us a slide of some parched looking vines in the Rhone valley, with dried leaves and dehydrated grapes. “They are dying” he said. On the right-hand side is a photo of the same vineyard one year later. It has a lush, green canopy. This is after a season of irrigation.

Sicily

Arianna is not impressed. “Using irrigation to save a vineyard is like taking a dying person to hospital. It might be necessary but it’s not a long-term solution.” Deloire insists that irrigation was the only solution for the Rhone vineyard “because they are not selling their wine for a high price. They can not afford to have cover crops or implement strategies to increase organic matter.”