WINE DAY-CANTINE APERTE

This Sunday is local election day in Sicily as well as the day that selected cantinas open their doors to the public for tours and tastings. This is a national tourism program in its 14th year, with the slogan, “Take a closer look at what you are drinking.” Wine tourism here is growing and although it is not as famous as the Napa Valley, and although they don’t have a movie like “Sideways” to promote them, Sicilian wines are fast becoming more popular in the US. We have always been fans of local wines and just recently decided to switch to tasting bottles of varied local chardonnays, inzolios and catarrattos and blends, all of which are local white grapes.
On our way out of town, we noticed a new sign for an agriturismo about a mile away from our house. We decided to investigate Torre Tabia and found relatives of friends running the place who knew us. There was a lovely pool and 10 inexpensive rooms so we think it is a nice place to send people. We also ran into a herd of sheep, but they moved out of our way (just barely). This encounter prompted Steve to say that he had already had enough adventures even if we did not get to a winery!
We arrived at Donnafugata winery near Poggioreale on the road to Palermo and found that we could get a small English tour. Our tour guide was a young German girl from Hamburg that spoke her native German, very good English and Italian also. Ah, those talented Europeans! But I had to tell her that in the US, we called groups of grapes “bunches” instead of “clusters” because she did not know that. Anyway, she did tell us details about white wine production that I never knew. The grapes for white wines are the first to ripen and the temperature must be low to process it correctly (6 to 8 degrees C, or about 43-47 F), so the harvest is often done at night in late August. The juice of the grapes is taken at this cantina and sent on to Marsala for further processing.
And the flowers seen in vineyards are there not for beauty and not for encouraging bees, as I always thought, but as warnings for any possible infestations of the grape crop. They call the delicate roses seen here the “guardians of the vineyards,” since any damage to them is closely monitored to prevent damage to the grapes.
Our second stop, Calatrasi winery in San Cipirello, was much bigger and did the entire process there, from collecting grapes to bottling the wines. The tour groups was large and the vats for the wine were HUGE. The storage room held over 4,000 barrels, some full and labeled in code, some waiting for the wood to mature (they all come from one region in France). Later, we had some very nice “flavors of Sicily” snacks, actually, enough to make up lunch! A Dixie Land band played and we spent our first afternoon in Sicily sitting on real grass, eating our plates of delicious cheeses, sausages, and pizzas and breads and drinking our wine, which flowed freely. I am not usually a fan of Ricotta cheese, but this cheese was so fresh it was bleating.
Since we had skipped a real lunch and since it was hot hot hot, we stopped in Sciacca to get gelato for our pranzo. While at the gelato store, we watched a furniture move from the eighth floor of an apartment building using an ingenius window mover. Then it was enough of adventure for the day, and time to get home!