Paper short abstract:

The Italian Alto Piemonte was once famous for Nebbiolo wines. Wine production over the last 150 years has been challenged by both industrial transformation and the impact of natural disaster. This long history has made contemporary winemakers particularly conscious of the impact of climate change.

Paper long abstract:

In a world of growing wine production, export, and noble grapes, what about those regions that have declined and almost disappeared? After a century and a half of natural disasters and industrial transformations, the wines of this sub-alpine area are hard to find. Through the experience of wine tasting in different vineyards, this paper examines the entwining of labor and environmental histories and argues that winemaking here is a constant negotiation with the presence of ruins. If in the popular imagination, ruins evoke crumbling classical temples, they also increasingly conjure industrial, even agricultural debris. As a growth-decay process, ‘to ruin’ focuses less on the productive elements of capitalism, but on its destructive.

In the Alto Piemonte, the detritus of fine wine, industrial rise and fall, and natural disaster is etched everywhere from the biology of the vine roots to the forest floor to the city streets. Over the course of the 19th century, phylloxera and devastating storms decimated wine growing and, in the aftermath, the wool, textile, and cashmere industry enticed growers with the promise of wage labor as opposed to fieldwork dependent on the vicissitudes of harvest and vintage. Using the theoretical concept of capitalist ruins, this paper reveals the way today’s winemaking in the Alto Piemonte is a cultural dialogue with the past about labor history and environmental change. This dialogue, in turn, shapes concerns about climate change.