Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey (At Table)

by adminItaly

Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey (At Table)

Robert V. Camuto

Language: English

Pages: 312

ISBN: 0803239955

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Inspired by a deep passion for wine, an Italian heritage, and a desire for a land somewhat wilder than his home in southern France, Robert V. Camuto set out to explore Sicily’s emerging wine scene. What he discovered during more than a year of traveling the region, however, was far more than a fascinating wine frontier. 
 
Chronicling his journey through Palermo to Marsala, and across the rugged interior of Sicily to the heights of Mount Etna, Camuto captures the personalities and flavors and the traditions and natural riches that have made Italy’s largest and oldest wine region the world traveler’s newest discovery. In the island’s vastly different wines he finds an expression of humanity and nature—and the space where the two merge into something more.
 
Here, amid the wild landscapes, lavish markets, dramatic religious rituals, deliciously contrasting flavors, and astonishing natural warmth of its people, Camuto portrays Sicily at a shining moment in history. He takes readers into the anti-Mafia movement growing in the former mob vineyards around infamous Corleone; tells the stories of some of the island’s most prominent landowning families; and introduces us to film and music celebrities and other foreigners drawn to Sicily’s vineyards. His book takes wine as a powerful metaphor for the independent identity of this mythic land, which has thrown off its legacies of violence, corruption, and poverty to emerge, finally free, with its great soul intact.
Watch the Palmento book trailer on YouTube.

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Said to myself, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’” Titta recounted. “We talked about it all the way home in the car, and by the time we got back it was decided that we would make wine in amphorae.” The following year, Giusto and Titta did a test. They ordered three amphorae (commonly used for decoration or plantings)—one each from Sicily, Tunisia, and Spain—in which they made wine from Nero d’Avola. The result: “The amphora from Sicily made vinegar. The amphora from Tunisia produced an anonymous.

Days later I would ask Giuseppe about the guiding philosophy of Frank’s agriculture, attempting to attach a label. “Biologico?” (“Organic?”) I asked. “Biodinamico?” (“Biodynamic?”) “No,” Giuseppe laughed. “Frank-o-logico. Frank-o-dinamico!” Leaning over in his chair, Frank took a small log of cut olive wood from a basket, opened the iron door of the woodstove, and fed the 40 winter wood to the flames. Frank seemed as consistent as only a madman can be, yet I found his mad logic oddly seductive.

However, resisted phylloxera, and the mountain was one of the few places in Europe with vineyards of nongrafted vines. The other factors were the combination of environmental traits for making elegant aromatic wines: hot days and cool nights, altitude, bright sunshine, and a long vegetative cycle that pushed the harvest back to October or November, weeks or months after most of Europe. “Etna is crazy,” Frank said. “It’s an area much more related to the north than the south.” Frank bought his first.

Away. It makes wines that have a big perfume that please people in a restaurant and then ten minutes or an hour later or even the next day . . . it’s over.” “If I was a producer who had to produce a million bottles, I would have to force nature, but for small producers it is stupid,” she said, turning petulant. “For me I don’t like that wine is the product of industrial processes. I hate this!” There was something so entirely childlike and unselfconscious about Arianna as she talked that it was.

His portion of the partnership to his sister Pina, who stayed on for the following decade before she quit to marry Pasquale Ferrara and join him at Sakalleo. For nearly three decades cos has helped restore Vittoria winemaking, which had seen a hundred years of decline since its heyday in the nineteenth century. Wine had been produced here since antiquity, but it was in the early seventeenth century with the founding of Vittoria that the local wine known as Cerasuolo took on greater importance. At.

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