
22-27 May 2022
EtnaWine Tour
Wines Native to Volcanoes - Part 1. Etna Wine Tour
There are places that flip your whole world upside down. For me, Etna is one of those places. Tropics down in Catania, t-shirts, and shorts from March, and then snow and skiing groups ascending the mountain, actually, a volcano. Petrified lava all along the driveway, plots covered with lava, then bulldozers breaking down the stones on the next plot to make it suitable for agriculture again. People building their life on a mountain that can explode at any time. And they've been doing it countless times and will continue to do so, because IDDA, the local name for Mt. Etna, is not a threat, but a powerful lady that they look up to with affection and respect.
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So what kind of wines would you expect to come from a vineyard at 1000 meters above sea level? From a vineyard that doesn't have "normal" soil, but rather a pumice - black volcanic sand, and lots of stones with such a unique content list mixed into the hot lava flow
To answer this question we will visit 4 wineries at the highest altitudes suitable for winemaking, we will see old, more than a hundred years old vines, that observed not only change of centuries, owners, but also a number of explosions on IDDA. These vines are ungrafted, they're planted before the deadly for European viticulture phylloxera broke out, these vines (protected by the terroir of Etna) were not affected by the disease that had no mercy in most of Europe.