The rolling hills of Italy’s picturesque Langhe region produce some of the country’s most prestigious — and expensive — wines: Barolo, Barbaresco and Alba, making it a favoured destination for high-end wine tourism.
But the vineyards of this prized terroir, much like growers of humbler Italian vegetables, are relying on undocumented workers to confront acute labour shortages.
Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government is determined to curb the influx of irregular migrants into Italy. Yet many Italian agro-food companies are building their business on the cheap labour these very migrants provide.
“The difficulty in Italy is that there is a huge need for workers but the politics around immigrants results in situations of irregularity,” said Piertomaso Bergesio, a leader in Langhe region with CGIL, one of Italy’s main labour unions. “The problem is wider than we think.”
That is particularly true in the Langhe region, where demand for labourers has surged since 2015, when Brussels eased rules on the expansion of European vineyards to meet growing global demand.
“In the past, the harvest of grapes was a family matter — done with relatives and retired people,” said Bergesio. “But things have changed a lot. Production volumes have increased, and they needed more manpower.”
During the summer pruning and autumn harvest seasons — when their need for manpower peaks — winemakers in Langhe region turn to labour brokers, who care little about the legal status of the migrants they hire, according to local prosecutors, winemakers, union leaders and migrants.
“There is very strong demand for labour in various seasons, including the grape harvest,” Biagio Mazzeo, a criminal prosecutor in the area, told Financial Times. “Winemakers struggle to recruit, so they rely on intermediaries. But the critical aspect is that the intermediaries recruit people that are in Italy illegally.”
Italy allows asylum seekers to work while their applications are processed, which can take years. But if they earn more than €6,900 in a year they are no longer eligible for free government shelters — a restriction that incentivises them to work without proper contracts.
If their asylum claims are rejected, they are ordered to leave, but many migrants continue to work illegally on the black market for extremely low wages in arduous working conditions and are sometimes subjected to physical abuse.
Fallou — a Senegalese migrant who arrived in Italy a decade ago by boat — came to the Langhe region last summer, after years toiling in vegetable fields around Naples.
At the train station in Alba, the main city in the region, he said he was approached by a Balkan man who offered him work in nearby vineyards at a promised pay of €5 per hour, a fraction of what wineries usually pay for workers they hire directly.
For the next three months, Fallou — who requested his real name not be used — was picked up by van every morning from near the train station where he and other migrants slept overnight. They were all taken to vineyards where he worked for 11 hours hoeing fields and pruning grapevines. He was given no protective gear, nor water, and had just one 30-minute break.
His supervisor, Fallou recalls, constantly shouted at him: “Faster, faster!”
Last summer, local prosecutors announced the arrest of three foreign labour brokers accused of exploiting workers, and released a video of a gangmaster lunging at African labourers with an iron rod.
Sergio Germano, president of the consortium of protected regional wines including Barolo, insisted the incident was a one-off and lamented “the mud thrown at us”.
But Mazzeo, the prosecutor, said worker exploitation in the Langhe region was far more pervasive than what was being pursued by the justice system. “Foreign workers never complain — they want to remain invisible,” he said. “They fear if they report to the authorities their conditions will worsen.”
Matteo Ascheri, who led the Barolo consortium until May 2024 and is the sixth generation of a local winemaking family, estimated that about half of the 5,000 workers in Langhe region were hired directly by wineries, while the rest worked for labour brokers with varying degrees of integrity.
“A third of the people working in the vineyards are in the hands of people with no respect for them,” he said. “It’s not something we can ignore. Being a collective brand, if there are people cheating and doing bad things, it’s a problem for all the community. We can treat people in a better way.”
While he led the Barolo consortium — which enforces quality standards for protected denominations — Ascheri urged winemakers to adopt a labour ethics code, but he said consortium members were resistant and voted him out.
“The idea here is if you don’t talk about the problem, it doesn’t exist,” he said. “I’m quite disillusioned. Probably the only way to change is a drastic way — if there is a shock from the outside.”
Even when gangmasters are prosecuted for abuse, punishments are typically light. In the so-called Iron Rod case, the three accused — who were Moroccan, Macedonian and Albanian nationals — pleaded guilty to criminal offences but none have served any time in jail. Mazzeo said gangmasters typically got back into business quickly even after run-ins with the law.
Wineries themselves are also almost never held to account, as prosecutors struggle to prove business owners are aware of worker abuse in their vineyards. “Because they use those intermediaries . . . it is very difficult to prove their awareness,” Mazzeo said.
Germano, the current Barolo consortium president, said winery-owners, and their senior staff, did inspect what the contract labourers did in the vineyards, but did not delve into the terms of their job. He said he wanted wineries to use a “white list” of brokers who follow labour standards.
“It’s practically impossible to know how much the employees of a third party are paid,” Germano said. “If we see a worker working with serenity, we think he is content.”
Fallou’s own experience in the vineyards ended abruptly with an inspection by authorities who discovered that he and several other workers did not have the legal right to work in Italy.
“Everyone thought ‘we’ll be sent back to Africa’,” he said, adding that a large part of his income goes back to Senegal in support of his wife and four children. “But if I go back to Africa, what would I eat? The ground?”
In the end he was granted temporary residence, which allowed him to get a formal work contract in another sector. Another Senegalese worker, who had toiled alongside Fallou in the vineyard, said he was never paid for much of the work he did.
“I have asked for the money, but they always say ‘we’ll pay you later; we’ll pay you later’,” Fallou’s co-worker said.
Mazzeo, the prosecutor, says the mistreatment of migrant workers was a stain on the prestige of Italy’s high-end wine region. “We are talking of an area that produces wine that is externally prestigious,” he said. “It’s hard to think that those entrepreneurs don’t have the means to pay more their workers more — and to pay attention.”
Additional reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi
