Italy

Severe Drought in South Italy Threatens Crops
Reuters, June 19, 2000

A serious drought in southern mainland Italy and the islands of Sardinia and Sicily is threatening crops as reservoirs recede, a senior irrigation expert said on Monday. ``The situation is worse than last year in Sardinia, Sicily and Puglia (southern mainland),'' Arcangelo Lobianco, president of the National Association for Land Reclamation, Irrigation and Land Improvement (Anbi), told Reuters in a phone interview. Lobianco said it was too late for some farmers to recover crops, and that they would need state aid.

Hot Weather has Italy’s Wine Growers Hurrying in Harvest
Associated Press, August 30, 2000

Italy's grape pickers are working 12- to 15-hour days to complete the earliest wine harvest in memory, hurried along by torrid summer heat that threatens to turn the crop to raisins on the vine. July rains followed by two weeks in the high 90s could make for a great year of high-alcohol, full-bodied wine or grapes of wrath if the harvest isn't in soon. "I have been working in this territory for 20 years and certainly this is the earliest harvest,'' Col D'Orcia oenologist Pablo Harri said. "Brunello in August just doesn't happen.''