Martorana

You might think it would be easy to find a small, hands-on estate in a rural society like Sicily, but actually there are precious few. Most family-owned farms have to sell their grapes to large co-ops, which are often controlled by the Mafia (no joke). So we were thrilled when we found the Martorana estate on the SW coast near Agrigento. The reason why Giuseppe can now easily bottle his family’s wine for the first time in generations? Because he’s a cop! After living in Tuscany for ten years as a police officer, Giuseppe returned to Sicily determined to implement some of the modern cellar techniques he’d observed up north. (In the late ‘80s, during the big Cosa Nostra cases, he was a young officer assigned to a judge in Florence; he spent his weekends visiting and studying Tuscan estates.) Back home, however, no one understood what he was trying to do—not even his own family—because steel tanks and green harvests had no real history in Sicily. Giuseppe’s own father was critical, and told his son that no one would be interested in the results. On the day he learned that, instead, their wine was going to be sold in America, tears actually sprang to his eyes. “You were right,” he told Giuseppe, “I am so proud.”