When I taste a wine I try to get rid of all prejudices. Otherwise in a bottle labeled as Barolo, even the poorest wine in the world would seem to me better than it is ... I try to concentrate only on what I'm trying to drink. Given the right combination with food and regardless of the funambolic terminology of winemakers and sommeliers, for me, a wine must be good. And I apologize for the alleged obviousness ...
The use of chemical escamotage (which are not necessarily synonymous with harmful) in order to correct some defects have over the past decades standardized the taste of wine, so much so that even with very different grape quality you end up getting a very similar wine. Today we tend to better enhance the characteristics of the vines, for example by reducing the aging time of the wine in barrique (the small oak barrel that gives the wine the typical aftertaste of vanilla) or by adopting alternative systems , such as steel silos, to minimize the alteration of the original taste.


The last frontier of modern enology is the production of wine from organic farming or similar, in order to obtain a more natural wine, although it may make sense to define natural a wine. The wine is more likely a work of art, in the literal sense of expression, from the choice of the method of vine breeding, to the pruning, to the type of pressure applied to the pressing of the grapes, to the techniques vinification used. Of not manipulable, therefore natural, perhaps there is only solar radiation (even if in Canada since 2016 it has begun to plant vineyards under a greenhouse). Net of what the new wine labeling as organic, biodynamic, natural, vegan can be pure marketing choices winking at the ethical and health trends of recent times, there are no discounts: a wine, I repeat, must be good. Well, alternative production methods are used if the results obtained are equal or superior to traditional methods. However, labeling a wine as organic does not justify oxidation: an oxidized wine is still an undrinkable wine.


Vini Sultana is a relatively young company but that has the roots of the culture of the vine in the nineteenth century, which makes the belief of tradition and innovation its own belief. It produces a refined, recognizable wine, an authentic expression of the territory in which the company vineyards are cultivated. Vini Sultana can reduce the interventionist techniques on the winemaking process to the essentials as she finds herself working with a raw material of excellent quality, to which she dedicates important attention during the year. For every single vine the necessary care and the right time are reserved to obtain bunches of grapes from the optimal quality: the production of wine starts from the vineyard...
The vineyards of Nero d'Avola and Syrah of Vini Sultana fall into the territory of Pachino and the netino, ie in the areas referring to the DOC Eloro, DOC Noto and DOP Noto. The two vines are vinified in red and rosé. Recommended bottle? Take a Bachynum with bottle aging of at least a couple of years, combine a dinner with strong flavors and let me know... The Vini Sultana model is to be considered a sort of third way compared to the massifying policy of commercial production from standardized wine and ideological extremities with dubious results, as it has succeeded in combining its ethical, ecological and dedication to the earth handed down for generations, with the technological innovation, continuing to invest you. The result? An authentic wine, original and genuine but good, so good.


Pachino is a land dedicated to wine since man has memory. Here Nero d'Avola, probably a native vine, is often cultivated still in alberello, that is to say the way it was bred by the Greek colonizers from the 8th century BC, exactly as in the small vineyard of our Agricamping Sophia. In the nineteenth century, the Nero d'Avola was marketed as Calabrese wine, as the wine from Calabria was more familiar and known to the French who bought lots of it to give body to their wines. From this practice it seems to derive its current name, ie the dialectization of the Calabrian word in calavrisi or calaulisi, then retranslated in calea (archaic synonym of grapes, in Sicilian) aulisi, ie Grapes of Avola, which then became Nero d'Avola because of the intense dark color of the berries. Other theories believe that Nero d'Avola is the original name, even if one should ask why it was not called Nero di Noto (a city that, historically, has always been more important than Avola ) given that it developed above all from Noto down. Others still consider the name deriving from a Greek island, Calauria, from which it would have been imported.
Even the Syrah seems to have no clear origin, in fact its origin is lost between Iran and Syracuse. Perhaps autochthonous, perhaps imported from the Phoenicians, the fact is that Syrah derives a wine absolutely complementary to Nero d'Avola, whose blend gives valuable results. And after so much talking about good wine, I make my famous Horatian verses and I am going to taste a good glass of Bachynum: nunc est bibendum!