everything together, and we both love Italy. I say almost everything since the hand that writes this preface is my own. But she is at my side. This is our introduction to our book.
We were astounded by the enthusiasm of the Sicilians we met. Visits to vineyards and wineries and sips of wine inevitably began with, ended with, and were blended into visits to historical sites and breathtaking panoramas and tastes of the vibrant flavors of produce and cuisine. We came back to Boston knowing that there was a compelling story to tell, a book to be written, and many returns to Sicily in the near future.
The book was also in our genes. Fran and I are both 100 percent southern Italian by ancestry. I am 50 percent Sicilian. My ancestors on my mother’s side came to New York from Ragusa. Fran’s ancestry comes from elsewhere down the boot. She feels Sicilian, though. We played with the possibility that her Saporito ancestors came to Campania by way of Sicily. In fact, Saporitos have thrived on the island since the thirteenth century.
Fran’s avid interest in Latin and Greek in high school led her to make her first pilgrimage to Italy with her schoolmates and her Latin teacher. She returned to Florence to study Medieval and Renaissance history and art. Of course, she became fluent in Italian. She speaks Italian so well that Italians ask her where she comes from in Italy.
After being a fine arts painter, I became interested in food and then wine and eventually became a sommelier, wine journalist, and Master of Wine. I gravitated to Italian wine because I felt more at home in Italy than in France, my other favorite wine destination. After my many visits, I speak Italian too. Though Italians understand me, they ask me where I come from in the United States.
Seeing our task in front of us, we made our plan. Fran took on the challenge of revealing the historical and cultural dimensions of Sicilian wine. She would write the first chapter to introduce readers to the history of Sicilian wine, set within the context of Sicilian culture through the mid-eighteenth century. As the wine expert, I would describe and analyze the Sicilian wine industry from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Hence, in the text, the I associated with tasting notes always refers to me. Furthermore, the opinions expressed about wine regions, wine producers, and their wines are mine and mine alone.
Woven throughout the book are three vignettes. We profiled three Sicilian winegrowers who through their work show their own love for Sicily. In their wines, we can taste and enjoy the genuine flavors of Sicily. I wrote the first two vignettes. Fran wrote the final one, set on Etna, and the afterword, finishing our journey as we had begun.
It has been a joyous journey.
Bill Nesto, MW
Whatever I shall have reported to you, I submit for you to correct or to adorn with the roses of your knowledge, so that like a vine cultivated and watered with the care of your knowledge, it may, yielding the most copious fruit, be rendered worthy of greater praise and gratitude. (Geoffrey Malaterra, The Deeds of Count Roger of Calabria and Sicily and of His Brother Duke Robert Guiscard, 44)
The monk Geoffrey Malaterra came as a foreigner to Catania at the end of the eleventh century. He was born north of the Alps and resettled in Sicily as part of the Norman conquest of Sicily ending in 1090. In a prefatory letter to The Deeds of Count Roger, Geoffrey appeals to the nobler instincts of his future readers and critics. We humbly do the same.
Bill Nesto, MW, and Frances Di Savino
1
THE ORIGINS OF SICILIAN WINE AND CULTURE
The culture of wine in Sicily is both ancient and modern. There is evidence of vine training and wine production from the earliest settlements of the Phoenicians on Sicily's west coast and the Greeks on Sicily's east coast from the eighth century B.C. In the long parade of foreign powers and people who have invaded and settled Sicily, it was the Greeks who brought an established culture of wine to this island. For the Greek settlers from mainland Greece and its islands, Sicily was the fertile and wild frontier on the western edge of their Mediterranean world. The gods and heroes of Greek mythology also ventured to Sicily. Upon sailing to Sicily, the protagonist-hero of Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus, together with his crew of men, approached the mighty Mount Etna and the untamed land of the Cyclops with more than a little trepidation. The Cyclops are the giant one-eyed creatures who in ancient mythology dwelled on Mount Etna (and who were reputed to eat wayward explorers). Homer gives us the following account of this forbidding race:
At last our ships approached the Cyclops’ coast.
That race is arrogant: they have no laws;
and trusting in the never-dying gods,
their hands plant nothing and they ply no plows.
The Cyclops do not need to sow their seeds;
for them all things, untouched, spring up: from wheat
to barley and to vines that yield fine wine.
The rain Zeus sends attends to all their crops.
Nor do they meet in council, those Cyclops,
nor hand down laws; they live on mountaintops,
in deep caves; each one rules his wife and children,
and every family ignores its neighbors.1
From these twelve lines, probably written around the time of the earliest Greek settlements in eastern Sicily, Homer tells us much about the image and reputation of Sicily among his fellow Greeks since Odysseus's mythical time during the Mycenaean Age, between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries B.C. He describes the island as a lawless but wildly fertile place. The natives are beasts who lack any farming skills or tools. The Sicilians, according to Homer, lack culture (i.e., the essential skills to cultivate soil). And yet the wheat, the barley, and the “vines that yield fine wine” thrive all the same. We also learn that the indigenous people are an insular patriarchal tribe who ignore even their own neighbors. Homer then adds that such creatures are neither explorers nor artisans but inhabit a generous land which a little industry could make an island of plenty.
The Cyclops have no ships with crimson bows,
no shipwrights who might fashion sturdy hulls
that answer to the call, that sail across
to other peoples’ towns that men might want
to visit. And such artisans might well
have built a proper place for men to settle.
In fact, the land's not poor; it could yield fruit
in season; soft, well-watered meadows lie
along the gray sea's shores; unfailing vines
could flourish; it has level land for plowing,
and every season would provide fat harvests
because the undersoil is black indeed.2
What is so striking about this description is how little the outsider's image of Sicily and Sicilians has changed in the intervening 2,700 years. Many of the cultural shortcomings and natural qualities that Homer chronicles are writ large throughout much of Sicily's history, for reasons that this chapter will explore. That may make Homer as much an epic prophet as an epic poet. The history and culture of Sicily, however, are far richer and more complex than any literary
