The wines of Il Censo take us to the unique Sicilian town of Palazzo Adriano. You've probably never visited — located about 30 miles south of Palermo, it is off the tourist trail — and... Read More

The wines of Il Censo take us to the unique Sicilian town of Palazzo Adriano. You've probably never visited — located about 30 miles south of Palermo, it is off the tourist trail — and yet you may have seen its beautiful piazza in Cinema Paradiso. What you don’t learn from watching the film is that the town was for centuries thoroughly Albanian, as refugees from the Ottoman invasions settled here well into the 19th century.

But the visitor that we care about in this story was neither Albanian nor a movie director from Rome seeking a second life. It was Giampiero Bea, son of the great Paolo Bea. His visit was to Gaetano and Nicoletta Gargano, whose family has farmed nearby vines and olive groves for over 200 years.

One thing led to another, and soon the Garganos were making Sicilian wines in the style of Paolo Bea. Just a couple years ago, Giampiero introduced the couple to Neal Rosenthal, and suddenly the wines became available in the U.S. We have bought everything that we could ever since, and the latest allocation has just arrived.

Say Sicily and say volcano and you will think of Mt. Etna, but in fact volcanoes have a long history across the island. The wines of Il Censo come from pure volcanic soils on high-altitude sites, which are a perfect match for the Bea-style wildness that these wines possess.