Marzamemi Memories

The ninth edition of an annual wine fair called Calici di Stelle (Star-Filled Goblets) takes place this evening in the picturesque seaside town of Marzamemi near Sicily’s southeastern tip.  Wine producers from the eastern half of the Val di Noto – including the Eloro, Noto, and Syracuse appellations – will be presenting wines made from both indigenous and international vine varieties.  In addition to the well-ripened Nero d’Avola wines from Pachino, there will be fresh and passito (dried) versions of the Moscato di Noto and Moscato di Sircasusa dessert wines and an elegant dry white wine from the Cantine Gulino estate made from 100% of a rare native variety called Albanello.

On our first trip to Sicily together in June 2008 we were welcomed to the Val di Noto by Salvatore Marino, a talented young winemaker who now is the enologist of the Marabino estate near Pachino.  At the end of our day together Salvatore took us off the wine road to explore Marzamemi.  He showed us the ex-tunny works (tonnara) that had first been established during the period of Muslim rule beginning in the ninth century A.D.   There was a fancifully painted boat docked in the harbor.  It had what appeared to be Arabic words and images decorating its hull – echoes of those distant Saracen rulers.

At the end of our visit, Salvatore brought us to a bar/gelateria next to the tonnara to try the black mulberry (gelso nero) and pistachio granite.  This was not your grandfather’s Italian ice!  It was a local version of whipped granita called cremolata.  Unlike gelato which is made with milk or cream, the cremolata is made with only fruit, water, and sugar.  The pistachio and mulberry flavors were as vibrant and intense as the Sicilian sun which blazed that late June afternoon.  This is a flavor memory!

  

Tonight we toast Salvatore Marino and the other winegrowers of the Val di Noto who will be sharing the flavors of their wines in the restored Palazzo Villadorata (the ex-tunny works) in the heart of Marzamemi.  Grazie for the memories.

Coastal Grillo

Winemaker Giacomo Ansaldi showed us a vineyard in the contrada (similar to a neighborhood) of Spagnola. The vines faced the Stagnone Lagoon toward Mozia Island to the west.  Further on was the Mediterranean Sea.  Giacomo, Fran, and I zig-zagged through old, scraggly alberello vines.  They were Grillo, the white variety prized for making the highest quality Marsala, called Vergine.  Ansaldi dreamed of making wine from that vineyard, but someone else owned it.

Giacomo drove us back to his cantina, La Divina, where we tasted several Grillos made from grapes harvested in the 1990s on Mozia Island. The tan-colored wines had citrus and nutty smells. They were dry on the palate. Their body expressed solidity.  Intertwined sourness, bitterness, and salinity trailed off as the flavors slowly finished.  They were my favorite wines among his vini perpetui (plural of vino perpetuo). Vini perpetui are perpetual wines, wines which live forever.

What happened that day is described in Chapter 4 of The World of Sicilian Wine.  There, you will learn more about vini perpetui.

Since then I have been searching for young coastal Grillos. They are difficult to find. Nearly all are blended with Grillo from higher altitudes. The hilly ones are more aromatic, but lighter in body.

While judging a wine competition, Radici del Sud, in Apulia, I finally came across a coastal Grillo. It was labeled “Ariddhru” whose flavors brought me back to Ansaldi’s Mozia vini perpetui.   Because it was young, a 2012, it smelled of melon and apple, scents mostly imparted by fermentation. The mouth had some, but not all, of the thickness, sourness, and salinity that I tasted in those Mozia wines.  Angela Galia, the owner of the Trapani-based company, VeroVini, told us that her wine was made from grapes harvested in her vineyard in the Spagnola contrada. Eureka!

Angela explained what “Ariddhru” meant. It is what the locals call "Grillo".  Later my research showed that “Arridu” or “Riddu” is how the word is commonly spelled in Sicilian. “Ariddhru” is either an alternative spelling or phonetically approximates how it is pronounced. The word is likely connected to “Ariddaru” which in different areas of Sicily identifies various fruits including pears, apples, quinces, plums and lemons.  The word seems to be connected to the shapes of these fruits or their seeds. Seen in this light, the Italian name for the Grillo variety is unfortunate, because Grillo in Italian also means "cricket", an insect with no apparent connection to the vine variety.  Let’s Riddu the name!

I hope we will see more contrada-identified examples of Grillo, and, for that matter, of other Sicilian varieties.  Instead of aiming at pleasing a common-denominator palate, contrada wines will elucidate places through the medium of grape variety and the hand of man.  They will provide us with a library of unique flavors that better express the complexity of Sicily.

Sicilian Fancy Food

At the 2013 Summer Fancy Food Show in New York City earlier this month, the vibrant flavors of Sicily were on display.  From the organic and fresh wines of the Judeka estate near the baroque city of Caltagirone in Sicily’s historic Val di Noto to the dried caper berries in sea salt and the raisined (uva passa) Zibibbo grapes harvested from the volcanic island of Pantelleria by the small producer called La Nicchia Pantelleria, these Sicilian agricultural products revealed the quality and diversity of the island’s materia prima (raw material).  The six single variety (mono-cultivar) olive oils from the Hyblaean Mountains (known in ancient Rome for the finest quality honey) produced by the Frantoi Cutrera estate near the town of Chiaramonte Gulfi expressed the delicacy, spice, and purity of Sicilian olive oil.  The Fiasconaro Oro Verde pistachio cream captured the essence of the prized pistachios from Bronte on Mount Etna’s western slopes.  The stone-ground organic whole grain durum wheat flour, Tumminia, milled by Molini Del Ponte made a dense and savory loaf of pane nero (black bread) of Castelvetrano, the town in western Sicily celebrated throughout its long history for both its bread and wine.  By design or chance, the Sicilian producers were located at the Fancy Food Show one floor below all of the other Italian producers in the Crystal Palace of the Jacob Javits Convention Center (as if still separated by the narrow Strait of Messina).  Meeting the Sicilian exhibitors and tasting their products evoked flavor memories of our cherished time on the Sicilian wine and food road.  If you cannot make it to Sicily anytime soon, experiencing the tastes of Sicily’s wine and food will bring Sicily home to you.

Premodern Winemaking

Here high-up on a clear plateau in the wooded hills overlooking the town of Sambuca in southwestern Sicily, we explored the stone ruins of an ancient pigiatoia (outdoor winepress) from the 5^th century BC. It is believed to be a spot where a settlement of Sicans – the inhabitants of western Sicily pre-dating the arrival of both the Phoenicians and the Greeks in the 8^th century BC – crushed and vinified wine grapes. It is an imposing cluster of whitish rocks firmly rooted in the surrounding soil. Wild grasses, caper bushes, and dwarf palms now grow at its edges. There is a higher rectangular vat with the remnants of four walls that once enclosed it. There is a lower circular receptacle nearby, with a cut-out channel that appears to connect the two tubs. We imagined the higher one was used for receiving grapes, and the lower one for collecting the fresh juice that flowed from the pressed grapes. The long cut out channel reminded us of the stone channels or tubes we have seen in old palmentos (crushing and vinification facilities) from the 19^th and early 20^th centuries around the island. Earlier generations of these Sicans likely acquired many of their winemaking skills from the nearby settlements of Greek Sicilians where the culture of wine flourished. To these indigenous Sicilians, the Greeks must have been the modern – or perhaps even postmodern – winemakers of their day.

Return to Corvo

In 1824, Corvo became the first Sicilian wine to be bottled, labeled, and commercialized.   The creator, Giuseppe Alliata, made both a red Corvo and a white one.  Corvo survived the Risorgimento, the phylloxera epidemic, two world wars, and the Great Depression and subsequent ones to finally reach the shores of the USA in 1972.  It became a very successful US wine brand.  It was low cost and simple.  Today Corvo is less popular than it once was, but I don’t see why.  Recently I tried a 2012 Corvo white, an Insolia varietal wine, and a 2010 Corvo red, a Nero D’Avola.   Both wines cost slightly less to slightly more than ten dollars depending on where you buy.  The white Corvo showed a classic banana-pear cold fermented bouquet and was light, tart, and slightly effervescent on the palate.  The red Corvo had a vivid cherry and tar bouquet and was pleasantly sour and bitter in the mouth.   Both wines are light and refreshing enough to tempt refills.

Postcards from the Edge

Like their mythological counterparts Odysseus and Aeneas, intrepid explorers throughout the centuries have voyaged to Sicily.  As with Homer and Virgil, Sicily has loomed large in the imagination of countless storytellers, poets and playwrights throughout the centuries.  In one Arthurian legend, King Arthur was even reputed to have taken refuge on Mount Etna to nurse his wounds and forge his shattered sword Excalibur.  By another calculation, Sicilian settings, characters or other references were employed in more than half of Shakespeare’s plays, including The Winter’s Tale, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Merchant of Venice. 

A British traveler and explorer by the name of Patrick Brydone came to Sicily in the Spring of 1770.  Brydone chronicled his travels in Sicily in a series of letters written to a friend, William Beckford, that were later published in 1809.  For more than two months Brydone traveled the untraveled mule paths of Sicily from Messina to Etna to Syracuse and ultimately to Palermo.  In the letters describing his exploration of Mount Etna, the modern reader is struck by the clarity of Brydone’s careful observations of nature and man.  He describes the strata and facets of Mount Etna with the precision of a geologist and the passion of a classicist.  As he traveled along the seacoast from Taormina south to Mount Etna, Brydone also recognized the fundamental contradiction between Sicily’s celebrated fertility and historic poverty.

In recounting the massive eruption of Mount Etna almost a century before in 1669, Brydone also provides us with a remarkable tale of how one mountainous vineyard belonging to a monastery of Jesuits was carried away on a lava flow (and partially survived!).

“This vineyard was formed on ancient lava, probably a thin one, with a number of caverns and crevices under it.  The liquid lava entering into these caverns, soon filled them up, and by degrees bore up the vineyard; and the Jesuits, who every moment expected to see it buried, beheld with amazement the whole field begin to move off.  It was carried on the surface of the lava to a considerable distance; and though the greatest part was destroyed, yet some of it remains to this day.”

Patrick Brydone, A Tour Through Sicily and Malta (London: Vernor, Hood & Sharpe, 1809), 89.

Santa Tresa

Feudo di Santa Tresa’s 35 hectares (86 acres) of vineyards spread out within the heart of a triangle outlined by the village of Roccazzo and the towns of Acate and Vittoria. Massimo Maggio, also enologist at Vittoria’s Maggio Vini winery, and Stefano Girelli, a wine entrepreneur from Northern Italy, began this project in 2001.  The soil is classic terra rossa, sandy red ferrous soil covering limestone rock.  Comprising a villa built in 1697, a one hundred year-old palmento, and a well dedicated to Saint Teresa (shortened in Sicilian to Santa Tresa), this biologically farmed vineyard produces delicate and elegant red and white wines.  The 2008 Cerasuolo di Vittoria, the most important appellation wine of the Vittoria area, that I tasted recently was pale reddish-brown in color with a delicate nose of red fruits and underbrush. Astringency, bitterness, and sourness danced with delicacy and finesse on the palate. The wine was fully mature, yet remained refreshing, the kind of wine that invites rather than challenges, that stays in the background of a meal rather than dominates it. Enjoy it with a delicate morsel of roast chicken and even meaty fish.

As is the case with most Cerasuolo di Vittoria wines, it is 60% to 70% Nero d’Avola filled out with Frappato, a red grape native to the area.  What makes this wine so delicate and easy-to-drink? Frappato makes a paler, less dense in the mouth, and faster-to-mature wine than Nero d’Avola.  The sandy soil of the area reduces the pigmentation and tannic structure of the mature grape skins. Furthermore, after the fermentation, Massimo Maggio matured the wine in neutral containers rather than new oak barrels where it could pick up wood aromas and more astringency and bitterness. 

If you want to learn more about Feudo di Santa Tresa, visit the winery website, www.santatresa.it.  It is one of my favorites. With Sicilian folksongs and the sunlit countryside in the background, Girelli, speaking in easy-to-understand English, and Maggio, in Sicilian with English subtitles, form a duet. In tones, words and phrases, that evoke the balance and humility of their Cerasuolo di Vittoria, they tell the story of the estate, how the grapes are grown, and how the wine is made.

Massimo Maggio observing roots of Favino plant, used to fix nitrogen in soil

Spreading The Good Word

Since the launch of our book in the Sicilia pavilion at Vinitaly in Verona in early April we have been privileged to present our work at Boston University, Chambers Street Wines and the 92YTribeca in New York City, and last week at The Butcher Shop and Stir in Boston's South End.  What a delight to share our adventures on the Sicilian wine road with with fellow explorers and Sicily appassionati!  To all of our readers, we extend our heartfelt appreciation for your interest and support.  Thank you for helping us to spread the good word.  Mille Grazie.  

Sicilian Bread and Wine

This quintessential food and wine pairing was served at Margherita Platania’s Cavaliere estate on the southwest flank of Mount Etna, about 1,000 meters (mille metri) above sea level.   Margherita and her husband Saro brought us in the morning to a piccolo bakery (literally, a hole-in-the-wall) in Santa Maria di Licodia on our way up to their mountain vineyards.  Round loaves were being pulled from the brick oven as we entered through the unmarked portal.  An older mother and daughter manned the oven like the chief and second engineers in the engine room of a vintage steamship.  By the time we finished our walk-through of the walled vineyards (planted all in alberello), we were eager to sample the old-vine Nerello Mascalese Etna Rosso, Don Blasco, and that heavenly pane.  It was a match made on Etna!  Fresh salami from the Nebrodi Mountains and Ragusano cheese with black pepper complemented the bread and wine.  Both the Don Blasco and the Etna Rosso called Millemetri (which is made from younger vines) show the potential of this high-elevation property.  The Cavaliere estate was prized as a vineyard site in the late 19^th century – as chronicled in Federico De Roberto's The Viceroys, an incisive novel about Catania's aristocratic families of that period.  Margherita and Saro are restoring this storied land with both heart and head.

Market Gardens

During the period of Muslim and Norman rule, the market gardens of Palermo, Catania, and Messina abounded with the fruits and fish of the Mediterranean. They still do. The central market of Catania is located just beyond the Piazza Duomo at the southern end of Via Etnea – where the basalt elephant carrying an Egyptian obelisk on its back salutes the Baroque cathedral dedicated to Saint Agatha, the city’s patron saint. The fish market wraps around the outer gate of the city and is bordered by streets that are lined with open-air stalls of fruits, vegetables, nuts, spices, and other earthly delights. The air is filled with the sing-song cries of the vendors hawking their produce and insulting their neighbors.

You will need to brush-up on your Sicilian if you hope to understand this opera. The colors and aromas require no translation, though. Strolling the market gardens of Sicily, you are vividly reminded why Sicily has been celebrated for its fertility since the days of the ancient Greeks.