August – The Black Gold of the Carob Trees
A thousand-year-old tradition that becomes your story
Wake before dawn, when the dew still wets the grass and the air is cool with promises. Our farmers wait for you with hot coffee and carob biscuits while the sun paints the fields gold. They will show you how to use the long canes to bring down the ripe pods. The sound? Like dry rain on the grass, a natural drum announcing abundance. Your hands will turn brown, smelling of caramel and history.
At noon, in the shade of the oldest carob tree (three hundred years old, it has seen the Bourbons), you will spread the chequered tablecloth for the harvesters’ lunch: home-baked bread spread with fresh ricotta, tomatoes still warm from the sun, crushed olives, and that carob syrup that is pure liquid velvet – the same the Romans used to sweeten their wine.
You will return to the villa with pockets full of pods, hair scented with wind, and that good tiredness of those who have worked the earth.
September/October – The Birth of the Green Oil
From branch to bottle, your hands at every step
The adventure begins at six in the morning. Not in haste, but because olives harvested in the cool dawn keep all their fragrance. Ines will teach you the ancient gesture of “spuliciare” — running your hand along the branch so that the olives drop into the net like black pearls. You will sense the essential oil released from the crushed leaves, a green, pungent scent that is the very essence of the Mediterranean.
But the moment of truth comes at the mill. You will enter that cathedral of taste where the Rizza brothers turn your olives into an emerald-green paste. They will let you taste the oil flowing out, still cloudy and peppery, straight from the separator. Does it burn? Yes. Does it sting the throat? Certainly. It is alive, it is green, it is the soul of Sicily in liquid form.
The ritual is sealed with the “scacciata”: warm bread fresh from the oven, coarse Trapani salt, wild oregano gathered that very morning, and your oil flowing freely. One bite and you will understand why the ancients called the olive tree “the tree of life”.
You will take home not one, but three bottles: one to use straight away (you will not resist), one to rest until Christmas (it will be your most precious gift), and one to keep for that special day when you will want to return to Sicily with a single sip.
All Year Round – The Cellar of the Stars
When wine becomes a journey through time
This is not a simple tasting. It is a journey through time through flavours. We always begin with the Grillo of the latest harvest – fresh, saline, tasting of sea and minerals. Close your eyes and imagine the vineyards of Marsala beaten by the wind. And miraculously, there it is in the glass: the wind, the salt, the sun.
Then the Cerasuolo di Vittoria, the only DOCG of eastern Sicily. Ruby in the glass, cherry and pepper on the nose. This wine is born where the earth is red as the sunset. The vines have roots that go down 20 metres in search of water.
The crescendo arrives with the Nero d’Avola Riserva, aged in French oak barrels that still speak of vanilla and tobacco.
And to finish, perhaps a 1987 Marsala Vergine, or a Passito di Pantelleria with notes of apricots and volcano.
The Promise
These are not activities. They are doors that open onto the soul of Sicily. You will go home with hands that smell of earth, a heart full of stories, and that sweet nostalgia of those who have lived, even for a single moment, the true life of this magical island.