About me
Paolo Calì, pharmacist and winegrower in Vittoria
I grew up in Vittoria, in a family tied to this countryside for more than three centuries. As a boy I couldn’t wait for the afternoon, when I went out to the fields with my father: we came home with our shoes full of sand and plenty of stories to tell. I studied and became a pharmacist, but I never stopped thinking about that land. At a certain point I decided to put it back at the centre of my life.
In the old farmhouse in contrada Salmè we have also restored an eighteenth-century palmento, the stone building where grapes were once trodden and pressed. I like the fact that different times live side by side here: what we inherited, the vineyards we planted ourselves and every new harvest that makes us question everything again.
I never thought that making wine meant repeating a formula. I brought a pharmacist’s curiosity with me, but I soon learned that the vineyard doesn’t give the same answers from one year to the next. You have to observe, taste, make choices and take responsibility for them.
A story made of choices
The timeline
1700sMy family farms the land of Vittoria, in contrada Salmè.
2001I plant my first vineyard on an ancient dune of marine sand.
2003The first harvest comes in and Manene takes shape, named after my son Emanuele.
2005Cerasuolo di Vittoria becomes a DOCG: the first in Sicily, and still the only one.
2008Osa! is born: my Frappato made as a rosé.
2011The first cru is born: Forfice.
2014With Blues I give Grillo a voice too: my white wine.
2018Mood is born: a sparkling rosé from Frappato, made with the ancestral method.
2020My research into the differences between the plots takes shape in three crus: Pruvuletta, Forfice and Niscia.
How I work
Selection begins in the vineyard
When I started, in 2001, I chose to plant only native Sicilian varieties. I wanted to understand what Frappato, Nero d’Avola and Grillo could become on our sands. In the vineyard I farm organically: a lot of the work is done by hand, from pruning to selecting the bunches. It isn’t a romantic detail. It is the most practical way I know to notice in time what a plant needs.
Among the rows I don’t just check ripeness. During the year we work on the canopy, on the balance of each plant and on the number of bunches. For the most important selections we leave out whatever hasn’t reached the ripeness we are looking for: I would rather bring fewer grapes into the cellar and know them better.
How I work
In the cellar
In the cellar, with the oenologist Emiliano Falsini, I try not to lose what we have built up over the year. Fermentations start without added selected yeasts and the wines are not filtered. This doesn’t mean giving up technique or decisions: it means using them to accompany the grapes, not to make them say something they are not. For the single-plot wines I choose ways of making and ageing the wine that are designed to interpret each harvest.
Gallery