The Bottle My Friend Translated

I had three friends over for dinner, and I had given myself the job I always give myself, which is the food and the drink. The food I can manage. The drink is where I get particular, because choosing a bottle for a specific table is one of the few small acts of editing that still belongs entirely to the host. One of the three is Peppe, who is from Sicily, so I went looking for a Sicilian wine to put in front of a Sicilian. The bottle I landed on was Baglio Gibellina's u Passimiento. It cost around sixteen pounds. I have bought it many times since, and recommended it more often than that, which is the most honest thing one can say about a wine. I would like to claim some expertise in the choosing. I have none. I knew it was Sicilian and I knew the price, and beyond that I picked it much the way I pick a padel racket: by the look of the thing and a hopeful guess, a habit this magazine examines elsewhere, and not to my credit.

I chose it for the island, and the simple courtesy of pouring a man the wine of his own place. What I had not noticed, until Peppe picked the bottle up and turned it to the light, was what the winery had put on the neck.

Above the name, in gold, there is a small stylised drawing. An aerial view of something: a grid of pale rectangular blocks, split by dark channels, the logic of a town imposed on a slope and then half-broken by it. I had taken it, if I had registered it at all, for a vineyard seen from the air, or a piece of decorative geometry of the kind wineries reach for when they want to look serious. Peppe set the bottle down and told me what it actually was. Over the course of the evening, between courses, he told me the rest.

What he told me was this. In the hills of western Sicily, between Salemi and Santa Ninfa, there was a town called Gibellina. On the night of 14 to 15 January 1968 the Belìce earthquake moved through the valley in the early hours and took the hill towns with it. Gibellina, Montevago, Poggioreale, Salaparuta. The dead were counted differently depending on the source, somewhere near three hundred by most accounts. The earthquake killed fewer than its scale suggests and unhoused almost everyone: four towns were razed in a few minutes, and close to a hundred thousand people were left without a home. Gibellina was not rebuilt where it had stood. The ground was judged unsound, and the survivors were moved roughly twenty kilometres down the valley to a new town, Gibellina Nuova, which was given wide modernist streets, a great deal of public art, and the difficult job of being a town nobody had asked to live in.

The old site sat empty for over a decade. Then, in 1980, the artist Alberto Burri was invited to make something for Gibellina. He went to look at the new town and declined to work in it. He chose the ruins instead.

This is the part Peppe told slowly, because it is the part that does the work. Rather than clear the rubble, Burri had it compacted within the lines of the old streets and poured white concrete over it in wire-meshed blocks, none much above a metre and a half, following the plan of the town that had been there. The houses became solid. The streets between them stayed open, wide enough for one person to walk down. You do not look at Il Grande Cretto. You walk into it, down a street that is no longer a street, between blocks that are the shape of houses and contain the houses they are shaped like.

The formal history is on the record, and the Fondazione Burri gives it plainly. Construction began in 1985. It halted in 1989 at 66,000 square metres, and was finished only in 2015, for the centenary of Burri's birth, at the full 86,000 the design had always called for. Burri did not live to see it whole. He died in 1995, the thing two-thirds poured and stopped. It is the largest work he ever made, and among the largest works of land art anywhere, by most accounts. None of which was quite the point Peppe was making across the table. The point he was making was the quiet of it. The drawing on the neck of the bottle is that town, seen from the sky.

I want to be careful here, because I have not stood in it. What I have is the bottle, and Peppe's account, which is its own kind of source. He grew up with this story the way the rest of us grow up with the names of local rivers. That is not a living witness to January 1968 itself, and a piece that wants the full human right of it still needs one: a resident or family who lived the night and the move down the valley, field-obtained, on the record. Peppe's telling answers the story's spirit. It does not retire the reporting.

So the winery. Baglio Gibellina keeps its Sicilian address in the new town, with vineyards in the hills between Salemi and Santa Ninfa, the same hills the road climbs on the way to the ruins. The front of the bottle reads vino e cultura. There is a red in the range called Terremoto Rosso. A producer that puts the earthquake on one label and the buried town on the neck of another is not being coy about the ground it works.

The wine in my glass that night was a Sicilian red made in the appassimento manner, the grapes left to wither and concentrate before pressing. It is Nero d'Avola dried on the vine for weight, with Frappato picked earlier. A Sicilian appellation, organically farmed. The Nero d'Avola gives the colour and the body. The Frappato keeps it from sitting down. In the glass it is warm and faintly raisined and has not entirely surrendered its freshness, which is roughly what the method is for. We enjoyed it, plainly and without ceremony; the bottle went round the table more than once and did not last the main course. Peppe drank it without comment, which from him is the higher compliment.

There is a smaller story on the same bottle, and it is not the one the bottle means to tell. Below the name are the words 50 anni and what looks like a family name, Martino, and the front reads vino e cultura, in the manner of an estate that has worked one hillside for generations. It is not quite that. Baglio Gibellina is a Sicilian label of the Biscardo family, not of Gibellina, nor of Sicily, but of Verona, a house making wine in the Veneto since 1878. Martino is a Biscardo. The 50 anni is the name of a range, not a count of years on the Belìce hills. I hold it against neither the wine nor the winery; the wine is good, and the winery is only doing what most do with a striking hillside and a story to match. But it lifts the label off the ground a little. The vineyards are real and Sicilian and where the bottle says they are, up between Salemi and Santa Ninfa; the intimacy the label implies sits with a firm the length of Italy to the north.

Here is the thing the ownership does not undo. Not many wines make me want to get on a plane; this one has. The wine is good and cheap and no more than that. What did it was Peppe's story of the earthquake and the white concrete poured over the streets, told between courses at my own table. Sicily is on my list now, the Cretto with it, and I would like to walk into those channels the way a person is meant to.

What stays with me is that the island handed me two answers to the same night, and I poured one of them without knowing the other. Burri's answer is elegiac and final. He took the town that died and made its death permanent and walkable, a thing you can stand inside and not mistake for anything alive. The winery's answer is agricultural and ongoing. It works the hills, presses the fruit each year, and carries the image of the dead town on its bottles as a kind of address rather than a memorial. One says this is where the town ended. The other says this is where we still are. They are reading the same hillside from opposite ends of the same sentence, and for around sixteen pounds you can have the second one on your table.

It is a wine I keep going back to, and it is worth seeking out: not many bottles carry this much history and knowledge into something this good to drink. You may not have a Peppe across the table to turn it to the light, but the bottle carries enough of the story to begin the conversation on its own.

How this was reported: written from a dinner at the author's own table. The wine's history and the Biscardo family's ownership are drawn from the producer and importer record and public sources. No source was paid; no product was gifted.