Sagana

Cusamano's 2005 Sagana is a very good example of a Sicilian red that is somehow not baked into submission by the venerable Sicilian summer sun. The vines, clinging low to the torrid soil, gather their nutrients from the ferocious summer sun of the island that burns most greenery into a withered pale brunello. This wine is a dark morello cherry purple triumph over the legendary sun and lack of moisture. It is somewhat of a miracle, as are most Sicilian wines. If you have been to the island in late September, you know what I mean. Days upon days of limitless blue. Not a cloud, unless you are near the puffs of condensed cotton over Etna. Sun on sun on land, parched and begging for rain. In late September, a sunrise in Sicily is followed almost immediately by heat. The sea seems to roil in constant haze. A wine waiting for the summer rains that start at the end of September. The Sagana bears all of this alchemical tension within it and much more. It offers its mysterious essence to you from a blessedly sun burnt and fertile land. With an understated nobility, it is like Lampedusa describing his family's home in Palermo after it was decimated by American bombers during WWII. He called it his home, not a palazzo. The Cusamano people are not fooling around. They are producing wines that evoke images that hug the land and speak from the island's bedrock. When a wine can do this the winemakers are artists working in consort with our Mother, Nature. Ancient strains and notes from a volcanic land distilled in a liquid made from the earth and sun and air and water.

P.S. Thanks to my friend Alfonso Cevola who tells me that "sagana" in Sicilian means "a hidden supply reserved for only for close friends or family". Now I know why they chose this name for the wine.