With all this horrible wet weather, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time looking back on holiday snaps from the summer. We spent two amazing weeks exploring Sicily and I have three main things to report back.
Firstly, it’s a bit warm in August. We had temperatures around 40 deg C – and just looking out from our air conditioned car got me sweating.
It’s far more mountainous that I expected. Obviously I knew about Mount Etna – but the mountains around Palermo and across the centre of the island were proper chunky.
And finally they absolutely know about food; as countless pastries, pizzas, pastas, arancini, salads, granita and gelati will confirm.
These three things also explained a lot about Sicily’s wine.
I knew it was going to be hot. I’d been to Sicily previously in the summer, but this year the sun was turned up to extra-crispy. Sea-breezes helped to temper the heat if we were lucky. Most sensible people decided to hide during the hottest part of the day. Of course we (I) chose to go out and explore and more than once underestimated the elements. In literature’s most famous account of historic Sicilian life, ‘The Leopard’ tells a visitor to the island “Six times thirty days of sun sheer down on our heads…this summer of ours…is as long and glum as a Russian winter”. And Don Fabrizio wasn’t wrong. We loved the heat but after two weeks I’d had enough and was looking forward to the more tolerable temperatures of an English summer. And with this baking heat, it was interesting to see how the vines were grown in different parts of the island.
Around Vittoria I saw a lot of (mostly eating) grapes trained at height in a pergola style – which is one way of keeping the fruit under leaf and out of direct sunlight. A lot of them were also netted and covered to provide not only protection from birds and pests, but also shade from what was a baking hot sun. Further away in hilly areas, there was a lot of leaf cover left on the vines, again, to provide shelter from Helios’ firey reach.
Mount Etna is by far the highest point on the island. I dragged the family up as far as we could go just to get close to the action at the top. Obviously we had a guide for the noisy stuff around 3000m above sea level, but the journey up from Catania was fascinating. We left the city behind and headed up through villages, fields and alpine forests before everything turned dark grey and ash covered. There’d been a fair bit of recent activity and the streets of Catania had a good covering of volcanic ash. But that was also the case in all over the foothills. On the way down the driver explained the importance of grapes and olive to the local economy and how the fertile ash was as much a blessing as a curse. We passed a well know winery, Nicosia, whose wines I found in various supermarkets around the island. Some of the grape plantings here were around 700m – which offers cooler temperatures and cold nights, helping the grapes reach optimum ripeness.
Away from Etna the mountains are far lower, although not insignificant. And when we travelled up to the north west of the island, the mid and lower slopes of these dramatic rocky outcrops were covered in vineyards and olive groves.
The final takeaway from my trip is an extension of something we all know already: just how important food and drink is to Italians. It’s not a surprise that there were some amazing dishes on the menus at restaurants or fresh produce at the markets. But from a wine point of view – the selection on offer at every supermarket really excited me. There were bottles from right across the island and everywhere we stopped had its own surprises. Even a tiny little Spar supermarket in Ragusa had wines I’d only tasted on my Italian Wine Scholar course and others I’d never even come across. They weren’t just from Sicily either. There were Refroscos from Friuli alongside some beautiful Carricantes from Etna. Next to the Cerasuolos from Vittoria were Nero D’Avolas from Erice and Gavis from the Piedmont. I tried as many as I could, especially as they weren’t that expensive, but I only scratched the surface.
On the last full day of our holiday I dragged the family out to the Donnafugata winery near Vittoria. They are one of the big players in Sicily and I’d recently been treated to some of their best wines at the Italian masterclass I attended earlier this year (see previous post). We arrived as the skies darkened and the wind started howling, driving clouds of dust across the roads. They were closed for lunch and I didn’t have an appointment so I hoped there’d be someone in as I wanted to buy a couple of bottles to bring home. The team there were so accommodating and talked me through their entire range from the Etna wines, to the Nero D’Avolas from the south and their famous Mille e Uno Notte blend – which I’d tried earlier in the summer.
So it was perhaps a fitting final meal of the trip in a restaurant in the dramatic old hill top city of Ragusa Ibla, where I had the best culinary experience of the whole trip. A perfectly made cannoli with a beautiful glass of Donnafugata’s Passito wine Ben Rye from the island of Pantelleria. The air-dried Zibibbo grapes were herby, orangey and full of freshness and provided the perfect partner to the sweet creaminess of the ricotta filling.
Every time I go away I learn something about wine. Whether it’s from the waiter in San Vito Lo Capo who recommended an amazing pairing for my tuna, the winery worker at Donnafugata who talked their fermentation process or simply looking at the landscape to see how the grapes are grown. I don’t want to stop learning and Italy holds a bit of a spell over me.
I’d go back to Sicily tomorrow if I could. The people were friendly, the food was amazing, the mountains were beautiful and I have had more than enough of the filthy English weather!
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