SICILY: AN ISLAND THAT IS RECLAIMING ITSELF

Sicily is the largest island in the Mediterranean, at 25,000 square kilometers, and has a range of terrain, climate and dialects that would be remarkable even for a nation. But what defines the island is its history of occupation. The Greeks established colonies in the 8th century BCE, introducing viticulture to the island, followed by the Carthaginians, the Romans, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, the Byzantines, the Arabs, the Normans, the Swabians, the Angevins, the Aragonese, the Spanish Bourbons, the Savoyards, the Austrians, the Bourbons again, and then finally in 1861, Sicily was absorbed into the unified Republic of Italy. Each occupier left its mark on the landscape, the language, the food, and the culture. And throughout this occupation we simply cannot ignore the elephant in the room: The Mafia, aka Cosa Nostra, "Our Thing".

We’ll get to the specific reason for why we’re bringing organized crime into a wine club newsletter (hint: it has something to do with one of the wines), but let’s be clear that the Mafia was not simply organized crime. The Mafia’s roots are inextricably tied to Sicily’s history of foreign occupation in that it provided native Sicilians with a consistent recourse to justice, economic opportunity and security, the operating word being “consistency”. The Mafia was a native, organized parallel layer of protection and employment to a population who had learned over centuries not to trust the occupying force du jour. Although relying on the Mafia came with a price, many Sicilians were willing to pay that price for consistency, a key ingredient for economic stability.

Although a unified Italy exhibited potential to replace the Mafia with a consistent representative government, the Second World War and then the Cold War complicated matters. After unification, the Mafia was deeply entrenched and its code of silence—omerta—was an integral part of Sicilian culture. Nonetheless, sixty years later, Mussolini made significant headway in weakening the organization’s stranglehold on Sicilian society. But, alas, Fascism failed and the Mafia seized the occasion to be a conduit for the Allied armies to liberate Italy via Sicily. And at the end of the war, the Mafia adroitly saw the writing on the wall regarding the global Communist “threat” and leveraged its previous role in helping the Allies to embed itself in Italian politics with a tacit arrangement with the Christian Democrats, the Italian political party favored by the United States and NATO, to use whatever illicit and violent underground means it could to suppress the Italian Communist Party (PCI), which was the largest communist party in Western Europe.

SICILY: AN ISLAND THAT IS RECLAIMING ITSELF

Source: vinodiversity.com/winemapofsicily

Sources: selectitaly.com, palateclub.com, cantinebarbera.it

For Sicilians who had lived under the Mafia’s shadow government for millennia, it is not difficult to imagine that Cold War geopolitics was less important to them than being allowed to be Italian citizens without a layer of organized crime through which to navigate; hence, a post-war anti-Mafia movement built steadily over the post-war years, catalyzed by figures such as Pio La Torre (a Sicilian parliamentarian murdered by the Mafia in 1982) and Peppino Impastato (we’ll get to him later). Finally, the end of the Cold War was the straw that broke the camel’s back: The PCI lost its ideological reason for being, and the Christian Democrats lost their justification for looking the other way, so that the political protection the Mafia had relied upon largely disappeared. The Mafia itself reacted with desperation, resorting to terrorism, such as killing two anti-Mafia magistrates and bombing the Uffizi in Florence, which did little to help their image on a national level, accelerating anti-Mafia law enforcement. By 1995, the government had confiscated major Mafia assets, including vineyards near Corleone that had belonged to the capo dei capi (boss of bosses) Salvatore "Totò" Riina, handing them over to cooperative farmers to cultivate. Sicily was finally being reclaimed by its citizens.

The fact that the island underwent a wine renaissance shortly thereafter is not a coincidence. For most of the 20th century, Sicilian wine was sold in bulk. Although there have always been historic family producers, when the international wine industry began in earnest, Sicily’s role in Italy was as an engine for anonymous, high-yield juice shipped north to bolster the blends of Piedmont and Burgundy. The island's extraordinary native varieties (e.g., Grillo, Catarratto, Nerello Mascalese, Nero d'Avola, Frappato) were grown for volume, not character. But once smaller producers were in charge without having to pay a “pizzo” to the Mafia, a new generation of Sicilian winemakers began asking what they could do on their own terms and conditions, with native varietals.

The three wines in your box this month come from three different corners of Sicily, as a sampling of its diversity. The western highlands around Corleone and Palermo sit on a high limestone plateau, dry and windswept, with alkaline clay soils. The southeastern corner around Ragusa and Vittoria is lower, warmer, and sandier, shaped by a dry heat tempered by altitude and the influence of sea air from two coasts. And then there is Etna, an active volcano rising to over 3,300 meters on the island's northeastern edge, its upper slopes cooled by altitude, its soils laced with volcanic ash in which grow ancient alberello vines, some over a century old.

CENTOPASSI: WINE AS ACT OF DEFIANCE

We get straight back into the Mafia story with this western highlands wine. Even the name of the producer is laden with significance. Centopassi means "one hundred steps" and takes its name from the film I Cento Passi (2000), which tells the true story of Peppino Impastato, the Sicilian radio journalist and anti-Mafia activist who bravely managed to broadcast his mockery of local Mafia boss Gaetano Badalamenti from a transmitter in the town of Cinisi for years before the Mafia finally caught up to him and murdered him in 1978. The one hundred steps were the distance between Peppino's and Badalamenti's front doors.

The vineyards that produce Centopassi wines are on land confiscated by the government from convicted Mafiosi and now farmed by a cooperative called Libera Terra (Free Land) on the high Belice Corleonese plateau, near the town of Corleone — yes, that Corleone. The cooperative employs local workers, including young people who might otherwise have been absorbed into the criminal economy, with full wages, benefits, and legal contracts.

True story of an ordinary Sicilian defying the Mafia.

Pietralonga vineyard with the Rocce di Pietra Lunga.

Featured June Amaro Wine Club Sicily wine: Centopassi Grillo Rocce di Pietra Longa VARIETAL: Grillo

This wine comes from a single vineyard at 600 meters (1,969 feet) altitude, Pietra Longa, named for the hundred-foot stone monolith (Rocce di Pietra Longa) on a nearby hillside, and it is dedicated to Nicolò Azoti, a young trade unionist from Baucina who was murdered by the mafia.

Although western Sicily is known for Marsala, also made from the Grillo varietal, when farmed at altitude, Grillo is something else. The grapes were hand-harvested, and after a soft pressing, the must was fermented in stainless steel and aged on its fine lees for nine months, which gives this high-altitude Grillo a weight and texture unusual for the variety; expect lemon pith, wet stone, and a hint of almond on a palate with a long saline finish.

FOOD PAIRINGS: grilled swordfish, salt-baked sea bass, spaghetti alle vongole, fried calamari, arancini, burrata with roasted tomatoes, aged pecorino

BISCARIS: A SUPPLIER TURNS TO BIODYNAMIC WINEMAKING

Antonia Guardabasso and her daughter-in-law Veronica Gentoli named their winery Biscaris as a nod to the region’s history as the town of Acate where they are located was at one time called the Principality of Biscari by decree of King Philip IV of Spain in 1633 when the nearby city of Vittoria was ruled by a woman. The estate is a modest 27 acres (11 hectares) in the Cerasuolo di Vittoria wine region, which is Sicily's only DOCG appellation. The appellation gets its name from the city of Vittoria, founded in 1607 and named after its founder, Vittoria Colonna Henriquez-Cabrera. She gave one hectare of land to each of the first 75 colonists who agreed to grow vines on another hectare of their own land in a successful effort to establish viticulture as the economic foundation of the city and region.

Biscaris did not begin as a winery. Antonia was a farmer who grew grapes and sold them, as most small producers in the area did, to the nearest cooperative. The transformation came in the early 2000s, when Antonia met the legendary Loire Valley biodynamic winemaker Nicolas Joly at an international tasting. After listening to Joly, she decided not only to bottle her own wine but to do it through biodynamic farming. Her first commercial harvest was 2004. Most of Antonia’s workers are also her relatives, and the winery building was once the car dealership of her son Stefano’s father. The same Stefano who is married to Antonia’s business partner Veronica.

The eleven hectares of vineyards include four each of Frappato and Nero d'Avola, and three of Inzolia, and are divided between two contrade: Casazza at 200 meters above sea level and Santissimo at 100 meters. The vines are all trained as alberello bush vines and planted in what local farmers call mare monti orientation, a deliberate alignment that captures cooling breezes from both the Mediterranean Sea and the Monti Iblei, each roughly fifteen kilometers away. The soils are terre rosse, which are thin red sands high in active calcium carbonate.

Antonia and Veronica

Albarello bush vines.

Featured June Amaro Wine Club Sicily wine: Azienda Vinicola Biscaris Cerasuolo di Vittoria (2023) VARIETALS: Nero d'Avola 60%, Frappato 40%

The Cerasuolo di Vittoria designation was recognized as a DOC in 1973 and upgraded to DOCG in 2005. It must be a blend of the two native red grapes of the region, Nero d'Avola and Frappato, and be aged a minimum of 9 months. At Biscaris, everything happens in stainless steel: maceration, fermentation, and aging, with no fining and no filtration before bottling. Yields are kept deliberately low at around 35 hectoliters per hectare, and there is no single-vineyard selection or special cuvée as the family wants what goes into the bottle to simply be the best expression of that vintage. The Nero d'Avola brings the structure and dark cherry depth while Frappato lifts the blend with vivid red fruit and floral notes.

FOOD PAIRINGS: pasta alla Norma, grilled lamb chops, pork with fennel, eggplant caponata, aged pecorino with honey, rabbit stew, charcuterie

SENTIERI SICILIANI: ONE WOMAN AND A VOLCANO

Elisa Trovato is an agronomist who has spent most of her career like her father did before her as a consultant for farms of Trecastagni on Mount Etna’s southern flank. At one point, Elisa decided to stop examining other people's vines and acquire her own. Specifically, she was looking for the 35- to 50-year-old alberello vines that thrive on volcanic black soils at 650 meters above sea level when they face east toward the sun rising over the Ionian Sea. She found the vineyards she was looking for, fell in love with them and the land on which they were planted and, as she puts it, made them her own.

Sentieri Siciliani (Sicilian Paths) is the name she gave her tiny estate, which is a little less than seven and a half acres. As you would expect from an agronomist, Elisa's winemaking is the product of close, patient observation of the vines, the land, the climate, and the vintage. She farms without chemical intervention, working the volcanic soils by hand. Meanwhile, Etna has become one of the most talked-about wine regions in the world over the past two decades. Its combination of altitude, volcanic minerality, maritime influence, and old vines produce wines of a refinement and longevity that took the international market by surprise. And Elisa Trovato arrived here not as an outside investor chasing a trend but as someone who has known this mountain her whole life and understood, before most, what it was capable of.

Elisa Trovato and her acquired vines.

Old albarello vines on the Sentieri estate

Featured June Amaro Wine Club Sicily wine: Sentieri Siciliani Etna Rosso (2022)
VARIETALS: Nerello Mascalese, Nerello Cappuccio

Elisa’s Etna Rosso is made primarily from Nerello Mascalese with a small percentage of Nerello Cappuccio. As you would expect, her winemaking technique is careful and methodic. After destemming the grapes, she macerates and ferments them for 10-15 days. After malolactic fermentation in stainless steel, the wine moves through barriques for 5-6 months, then large oak casks for 3-4 months, and finally rests in bottle for another 3-4 months before release. Moving the wine from steel through barriques and large oak casks produces a pale ruby, almost Burgundian wine with notes of wild strawberry, dried herbs, and iron-rich volcanic minerality on a long, fine-grained finish.

FOOD PAIRINGS: grilled lamb, rabbit alla cacciatora, pasta with wild mushrooms, sausage and lentils, aged caciocavallo, tuna carpaccio, roasted beets with goat cheese