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| My first impression of Palermo was not a good one. We’d traveled south, foolishly, by car from Rome, stopping overnight in Campania to visit Bruno DiConciliis and the spectacular Greek ruins of Paestum, not knowing that there is continuous work on the autostrada, make-work that’s gone on for years. Traffic in some stretches through Calabria resembled the 405 during rush hour; we thought we were in the clear when we arrived by ferry in Messina, only to discover that the autoroute from Messina to Palermo was equally clotted. We arrived late and exhausted, and found our hotel near the Vucciria market in the historical center of Palermo, a maddening, medieval warren of narrow one-way streets that reminded us of the East Village of the 70s, riddled with stray dogs and mountains of garbage (later, as the streets became less maddening, I learned that there was a garbage strike but at the time I assumed that garbage is just in the nature of Palermo). Nearly all shopkeepers in Palermo pay pizzo, a tax of sorts that is collected by the local Mafia and pay that rather than city fees, so the city is systematically starved of revenue including the money to pay private garbage collectors—naively, I’d expected Mafia extortion to largely be a thing of the past, but I was wrong. We ended up relishing Palermo and hope to visit again, just not via automobile (though you do want a car to visit Erice, a UNESCO heritage town not far from Palermo that feels carved out of a single rock). The everyday banality of Mafia extortion in Sicily is eye-opening to an outsider and heartbreaking, as you see the deleterious effects of this everywhere you go, but there is a sliver of hope with people who courageously organize and push back. Today, we have the Sicilian grower Centopassi in the shop with wines made from vines grown on former Mafia-controlled land south of Palermo that was confiscated by the Italian state. Centopassi is a winemaking project of the Libera Terra, an anti-Mafia organization formed in the mid-90s to fight the Mafia by creating jobs, economic opportunities, and educational projects. Wine co-ops often get a bad name as they are often a vehicle for ok if anonymous industrial wines, but Centopassi, in addition to its anti-Mafia virtues, is one of the good guys. Farming at the Centopassi properties is organic, and the winemaking is unspoofilated and made without added garbage. The winemaker is Giovanni Ascione, one of the most genial and engaging southern Italian growers you could hope to meet, who makes his own superb wines in Campania under the Nanni Copé name (sadly, I’ve learned that Ascione is retiring but we have been promised a bit more of Nani Cope so look for that in the coming year). At least one wine is made with selected yeast, but others are native yeast fermented. As an armchair vigneron, I like to pound my fist on my armrest and glare at the world with rheumy eyes, insisting that only wild yeast fermented wines shall touch my lips, but I also accept that there is nothing inherently evil with selected yeast and that the issue I have with their use is that it is too often employed to spoof wine and add flavors and aromas to make it conform to the preferences of widest psychographic, and at the same time, make it boring and taste-alike (this is why industrial Beaujolais, all inoculated with the same 71B strain, taste-alike and are as stimulating as a benzodiazepine). But enough throat-clearing: what about the wines? We’re tasting four wines, starting with a crisp yet textured catarratto, fermented in stainless and aged in huge old barrels, and then three reds: a perricone, a grape that often makes wines that glower at you from across the room, content to smoke their cigar and read the paper but here, destemmed and treated with the respect it demands, delivers something more graceful; another red, which is a blend of nerello mascalese and Nocera; and finally a nero d’avola raised in stainless. |
| Centopassi “Terre Rosse di Gabbiasco” Cataratto Sicilia 2017 Centopassi “Cimento di Perricone” Perricone Sicilia 2017 Centopassi “Pietra e Purtedda di Ginesetra” Sicliane 2016 Centopassi “Argile di Tagghia Via” Nero d’Avola Sicilia 20 |