I Custodi delle Vigne dell'Etna

About Winery and Wines

I Custodi are the keepers, the guardians of Mt. Etna’s vineyards: to guard means to preserve the land, to maintain the traditions and to respect the people. From these values and from the love for a beautiful land, where the vine was brought by man more than two millennia ago, spring the wines of I Custodi, the result of the generosity and the minerality of the warm volcanic soil, the cold of the Muntagna and the sun of Sicily. Healthy vines of all ages, growing densely on ancient dry stone terraces, supported by their stake in chestnut wood, are cultivated in harmony with the environment that surrounds them only by manual labor of I Vigneri, skilfull Etnean winegrowers. Winegrowing as it has always been on Mt. Etna for centuries, without synthetic chemicals, in respect of the people, the landscape and the nature.

Ancient legends, accounts of travellers and naturalists, works of art, poems and tales are witnesses to the Etnean viticulture since earliest times. Here, the peculiar microclimate and the vulcano’s fertile soil provide an ideal ambientation for the vine. Since the age of the Sicels, three millennia ago, vines and wine have always been in the centre of people’s life on Mt. Etna. And from the dawn of history to the 20th century, the gestures and manners of the vintners haven’t changed much. The wine presses that were in use up to a few years ago look the same as those described by Cato in 160 BCE. The vines have been bush-trained (what we call the alberello, little tree) for 30 centuries, and everywhere we still see the quincunx planting pattern every vine is equidistant from any other one surrounding it that was dear to the Greeks and Romans.