Read the beginning of Chapter 1, "Benvenuti in Sicilia" from one of our featured holiday gift books, Palmento: A Sicilian Wine Odyssey by Robert V. Camuto:

"I had arrived in Sicily only a few hours earlier, and on the drive to dinner I would break more laws than I had violated during any prior twenty minutes of my life. Indeed, I could always say that I was an innocent straniero merely following a lawless guide in Valeria, the waif with the brick-sized monogrammed Dolce & Gabbana belt buckle and the ever-singing telefonino, who greeted me at Azienda Agricola COS, which I’d chosen as my first stop in Sicily for all noble reasons. I was here because—more than two and a half decades after its founding by a group of university friends—COS had become a thriving symbol of the new Sicily. Its wines were fashionably sipped in cosmopolitan capitals the world over, and COS was considered on the cutting edge of the growing and wholesome natural wine movement. Indigenous grape varietals were farmed biodynamically (using herbal tea treatments and a few practices that resembled alchemy tied to the phases of the moon) and wines were produced with naturally occurring yeasts found in grapes and with minimal added sulfur (sulfites). More than that—burnishing COS’s authenticity credentials—the winery had been fermenting some of its wines not in wood barrels or steel or cement vats but in clay amphorae, a process reminiscent of the Greeks who had first settled Sicily; and therefore it elevated my role here to something like an epicurean archaeologist.

Continue reading “Off the Shelf: Palmento by Robert V. Camuto”