Cefalu

8/22

I have been getting up and running in the morning as the sun is coming up. It’s nice and cool and there’s a kind of peace and quiet here in the morning that I have never felt back home. The only time I have been anywhere more quiet was after the freefall when I went skydiving. Which, by the way, I have been looking into. One of my roommates wants to come with me. I think we might go in Palermo soon!

At work, we tasted wine from an experiment Laura has been doing with Nerello Mascalese. Now that the wine is finished, she is using micro oxidation to round it out and express the tannins from beginning to end, instead of just at the end of the finish. It has worked well and the wine continues to improve daily. It is great that Regaleali is big enough to have the support it needs to make great wine, efficiently, but still small enough to not mass produce or follow any protocols when it comes to the winemaking. Instead, it is very hands on and alive. Laura compares the winery to a hospital. She says that each tank is a patient who is changing and getting better each day. She has a goal or "plan" for each one and would like to see them have a particular outcome. She watches each one carefully, giving them the unique support to reach their goal, but realizes that although she would like them to progess down a certain path, everything might not go as planned. In this case she might need to go to a different tank to obtain that particular result she was looking for. I like tasting with her everyday and seeing how the juice changes. For example, if the juice starts to smell bad it is because the yeast is struggling and giving off an odor. It needs to be "fed" so that it can thrive and reproduce in order to convert the sugar in the juice to alcohol. When Laura tastes everyday, she decides what each "patient" needs or if they need anything at all.

8/23

We have the weekend off before the busy harvest begins so we went to the beach today! We headed up to the northeastern part of Sicily to a city called Cefalu. It was absolutely beautiful. The sea was like bath water. It was so warm I couldn’t believe it. The water is shallow for a long distance so you can swim pretty far out and you're still able to stand. I bought a raft and floated around for a few hours until I realized I was getting burnt and retreated to a chair under an umbrella where I read a book for the rest of the afternoon. Around 5 we went into the medieval town of Cefalu. The long narrow streets were lined with gelateria’s (ice cream and pastry shops), trendy stores, osteria’s, enotecca’s, ect. In the middle of this busy town was the Piazza Duomo which houses one of Sicily’s most beautiful Cathedrals. Right as the sun was setting, we reached the marina where we sat and enjoyed the magnificent view with our pistaccio gelato.




When we got home we made dinner and polished off 5 bottles of wine as we talked about everything under the sun. My roomates and I went back and forth asking each other questions and trying to gain an insight into each other's real lives. They filled me in on everything from their president (who apparently sleeps with lots of women) to their slang words and gestures, the best places to visit in Italy, the best food (Sicily wins!), their belief’s, the mafia, ect. I think we both learned a lot from each other and about what our culture’s are like. Our plans to go out turned into a drunken, 3 hour chat and at the end we were exhausted.