Cantina Cortese – Sicily as you don’t expect it!

In these days of being quarantined at home, it is important to find interesting distractions, and the on-line tasting from a Sicilian winery, with its great quality wines was very welcome.

We prepare the 6 bottles, the glasses, a couple of snacks for the tasting, carefully organised for aperitif time, meaning we don’t have to spit the wine out, and we connect to Zoom. Brother and sister Stefano and Marina Girelli have been in the wine world for three decades. Although he is from Trentino, Sicily has become Stefano’s wine country. He is keen to talk about all the work they have done in the vineyards and he gets excited about the terroir. “There are incredibly different soils just a few metres apart, that bring out amazingly different characteristics in the grapes.

To enhance the wines further, Stefano has pursued the philosophy of making organic and vegan wines, with no chemical intervention. Each strip of land is given the opportunity to produce and react at its own pace and express its own unique qualities – in the firm belief that this is the profound meaning of biodiversity.

Author: Emanuele Bompan