Into the Vines: the Wines and Winemakers of Sicily
Regaleali in Sicily. Italian wine is shaking its once poor reputation. (All photos: Francesco Lastrucci)
Chef Gabrielle Hamilton is the owner of Prune in New York and has been nominated for Best Chef in New York City by the James Beard Foundation.
By Gabrielle Hamilton
I was married for more than 10 years to an Italian. An Italian Italian, from Rome, and we traveled to Italy frequently. But somehow, we never went to Sicily. More confounding, for the 14 years I’ve had my Manhatttan restaurant, Prune, I’ve been selling, drinking, and championing certain Sicilian wines, never having met the people who make them. These excellent bottles from distant, faceless winemakers have arrived at my restaurant door stacked up on a hand truck and been lunked down the stairs to the basement by some indifferent, burly Brooklyn truck driver wearing a weightlifter’s belt, while I’ve signed the shipping receipt.
But I’ve always felt connected to these wines. When Prune opened in 1999, if you were eating in serious dining rooms throughout the United States, you found the same tuna tartare and goat cheese and beet salad being served by Nehru-jacketed waiters to a Gypsy Kings soundtrack. At that time, Sicilian wines were still generally thought of as cheap, mass-produced wines. Prune’s quirky dishes, such as monkfish liver on toast and roasted marrow bones, and the restaurant’s unapologetic East Village demeanor (graffitied-over front gate, tattooed waitresses) were as unfamiliar in the dining scene as Sicily’s peppery nero d’Avola, curiously chilled frappato, and nearly mentholated nerello mascalese were in the wine world.
In the 15 years since, we underdogs have supported each other. The experimental and defiant wines, made from indigenous grapes, found a clientele only in small, unconventional restaurants, and reciprocally, these idiosyncratic restaurants became more exciting by introducing guests to something new. Perhaps that’s why I have a particular allegiance to these wines. But early on, the attraction was simple: They were the delicious and opinionated wines I wanted to drink with the deeply personal food I wanted to cook.
Set 2,952 feet above sea level, Regaleali is one of five wine estates run by the Tasca d’Almerita family. The estate’s high altitude causes grapes to mature more slowly, which means harvest can last from September through November.
When I step off the plane in Palermo and take a deep lungful of the hot, early September air, thick with the smell of day-old brush fire and manure, I am jolted. Those first highly aromatic inhales are a vivid, uncannily familiar introduction to a land I’ve only ever sipped from a bottle. Within minutes I understand something more about these wines I’ve known, with their sometimes challenging personalities.
Like everyone, I’m intimidated when talking about wine. I’m about to spend a week touring the countryside, meeting the winemakers whose wines I have been serving all these years, and I am braced for the trip to be one long successive put-down by those wine types we have all met, the ones with the silk ties and the pursed lips. But if this is how Sicily introduces itself—as a terroir of brushfire and cow poop—how high and uptight can it be?
The two jovial guys at the car rental place relax me further. After putting me in a stick-shift tin-can Fiat, they settle into the more nuanced matter of my GPS system. Do I prefer a male or a female voice? I laugh out loud and start to describe the girl I’d like—perhaps a dark, Sicilian beauty? Hardworking but with a sense of humor? They are chuckling, too. Do I prefer Chiara? Or maybe Jessica? They both laugh and nod in fraternal agreement on Jessica’s merits. But would they be remiss not to highly recommend Benedetta?
Arianna Occhipinti is nicknamed the “natural woman” for her approach to making wines.
Soon Chiara and I are on the highway. Along the coast at first, and then up into the mountains, off the main road, and then onto gravelly, cracked pavement. I come to giant windmills standing stark on the hilltop like colossal white-winged angels. I turn off the engine and listen to the profound, oxymoronic nothingness of wind, and the whispering rhythm of the spinning blades—a brief but singular moment in which I get hold of my insecurities before I meet the aristocratic Tasca family at their estate, Regaleali.
Related: Our Man in… Sicily. Ciro Grillo Will Show You and Your Family a Good Time
The property is regal. The vineyards march on in endless neat, harmonic rows. Workers eat their paper-wrapped homemade lunches under a tree. A bright Tunisian-blue bench, a few cats, and an intoxicating arc of blooming jasmine welcome you into the courtyard. And the count himself, Lucio Tasca, stands on the balcony looking out on it all.
Alberto, Lucio’s gentle son, greets me, accompanied by his own boisterous young children, elegant wife, and slightly muddy dog, and instantly I am at ease. The thing that has brought me to this vineyard, in a way, is my own youngest son. When Leone was born, we carried a Regaleali catarratto at Prune, also called Leone, referencing the lion in the Tasca family crest so, of course, I had to come here first.
More from AFAR:
How to Eat Your Way through Italy
History in a Bottle: Feudo Montoni Winery
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