Elios - natural wines/vini naturali

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About Winery and Wines

Elios came about in 2015, when we both found ourselves having to decide on the future of our career paths.

We were both dissatisfied with our jobs, both fed up with working for other people’s dreams. Both in love for natural wines.

Despite coming from different backgrounds, what we had in common was a love of nature and of Sicily and the desire to revitalise our families’ agricultural holdings, which up to that point had been under the thumb of the industrial groups to which we sold our grapes and olives for next to nothing.

OUR IDEA WAS TO PRODUCE:

Natural Wine trough a low intervention winemaking process (without using chemicals or additives etc.), from the grapes that our parents sold to major wineries, thus giving the grapes the chance to truly express themselves and recover their lost dignity.

Our start was not simple. We bet on our lands and dared on something unusual for our area.

Practically all the people in our province (Trapani) are great vines cultivators but not winemakers. Nobody wants to risk any cent nowadays to make wine. People prefer to be sure to sell the grapes for nothing to big wineries, thus living in a comfort zones but at the same time complaining cyclically about the price and the low profit farming model.

We decided to go against the current, dreaming to relaunch the territory and the potentials of our farms.

But we also decided to give value to the following products, that represent the essence of the Mediterranean Diet:

extra virgin olive oil, following the entire production process carefully (our parents had always sold it locally and a small amount abroad but always at too low a price to justify paying meticulous attention to the production stages);

honey, the product that our parents did not produce until 2015 and on which we decided to take a chance out of the love and respect we have for bees, by creating a new hive station with native Sicilian bees.

WHO WE ARE

NICOLA

I graduated in Computer Engineering in 2009 and in the following years I worked as a software designer and developer. Despite loving my job, every day I spent programming made me increasingly feel the need to seek greater contact with nature.

With Elios I feel I have finally found my ideal balance, combining my engineering skills with agricultural entrepreneurship.

GUIDO

I graduated in Oenology in 2010 and worked as a winemaker consultant in the following years.

In my years of experience as a wine consultant I became aware that wine should not be a chemical product to be adapted to consumers’ tastes, but an expression of the nature and the characteristics of the terroir that the grapes come from. Nowadays I am proud to be a natural winemaker.

WHAT IS A NATURAL WINE?

NATURAL WINES ARE made only with organic/biodynamic grapes, without adding or subtracting anything in the cellar. No additives, no chemicals, no aromas, no selected yeasts, low sulfur, that’s it.

OUR NATURAL WINES

We make minimum intervention low sulfites wines only with our native Sicilian organic grapes grown between Alcamo, Camporeale and Monreale; areas all located in the north-west part of Sicily.

Grillo, Zibibbo, Nero d'Avola, Catarratto and Nerello Mascalese are the varieties we grow.