Girolamo Russo

di: Redazione

17/04/2017

Set on the north slope of the mountain, at an altitude of 650-780 metres above sea-level, the winery’s vineyards cover 18 hectares, surrounded by hazelnut and olive groves.

Re-established by Giuseppe Russo in 2005, and dedicated to the memory of his father Girolamo, the winery is a powerful expression of Giuseppe’s desire to respect and conserve his family’s traditional values, but interpreting those values in a new and personal way, introducing and developing new approaches to winemaking, but remaining in the village of his birth, Passopisciaro – the centre of the recent renaissance in the great red wines of Etna.

Giuseppe Russo

Giuseppe and his staff farm the estate organically, employing the traditional methods which have permitted these ancient vineyards to survive for well over a century.

And so, the old bush-trained (or head-trained) vines and new cordon-trained vines grow side-by-side, and the plants are tended to the old-fashioned way, by hand: spur pruning, ploughing, hoeing, trellising, and spraying with copper sulphate. In October, at harvest time, the grapes are carefully selected and the grapes from each vineyard are harvested and fermented separately, ensuring that the wine expresses the specificity of its terroir – the perfumes, colours and austere sweetness of each of these vineyards.

The land has a unique and extraordinary geological history: its characteristics are the result of centuries of volcanic eruptions. To fully appreciate the morphological complexity of this landscape, one has only to think that Mount Etna formed over half a million years ago. Each “sciara” (a word derived from the Arabic), in other words, each lavaflow which has cooled and solidified on the mountain’s slopes, has been shaped and transformed by the passage of time and by human activity, rendering Etna’s contrade, or districts, very diverse – as are the wines produced here. And so, among lava, ashes and brooms, each district has its own character, its own voice: engraved in the terroir that covers it, and which Giuseppe returns in the wines.

Contrade