Ammàno, Marilena Barbera's wine from Menfi, interview

A title like this at first glance seems like an exaggeration, but honestly: in my life as a winemaker there is a before Ammàno and an after Ammàno.
And this evening, at the end of the vinification of my twelfth Ammàno, I feel like I am finally fully aware of it.

The first harvest of Ammàno was 2013, a hot and dry year that at the time seemed extraordinary to me and that today is almost the norm. I had planted this handkerchief of Zibibbo, and the rooting had been slow: the vineyard grew little and produced very little, mostly a few bunches of grapes to eat, many young shoots continued to reject the grafts, and I stubbornly continued to re-graft them, and to fill the gaps.

In 2013 I was finally able to harvest about 5 quintals of beautiful grapes: fragrant, sweet, crunchy, indifferent to the terrible heat of that August.

So, problem: what do I do with these grapes, very few, that would get lost in the press? Well: I vinify them separately, I put them in a little tub and we'll see what happens. Even if I throw them away, it's fine anyway, it's a test anyway.
I keep the grapes in crates, I destem them by hand a little at a time, some vines remain, never mind – the fermentation starts by itself: the skins are hard, the cap compact, it takes all the weight of my (then) 54 kilos to break it up. TEvery time I finish the fulling I have broken arms and a foam half a meter high, but what a smell! 

The fermentation ends, quickly, just as it began (after all, in the cellar it was 30 degrees and the tub wasn't refrigerated). Now I have to remove the skins, somehow. My father had a wooden press that could press 20 kilos at a time, he used it right at the beginning, when we were still in the garage. I take it and sanitize it, it's still good for pressing Zibibbo pomace.
I do the decanting with a rubber tube and a bagnèra, imagine if I hooked up a pump for just under 4 hectolitres of wine.

Here, after a couple of months I taste it.
[I used to NEVER taste wine before it finished doing everything it had to do spontaneously, it made me anxious. It seemed strange to me, and it tasted of things I didn't understand. Then I grew up too: I understood that freshly made wine is like little children who scream, run everywhere, get dirty, stick their fingers in their noses and drive you crazy. Now I know what freshly made wine is like, and the anxiety has gone away, most of the time.]

So I taste it, and I taste something I've never tasted before.
Energy, Sea, Sicily, Menfi. Sunburnt skin after a day at the beach, salty from the Mediterranean, golden from the sunset, the scent of wild mint, shells, the sirocco.
And everything changes again, month after month, the broom appears, then the honey of the black bees.

It took me a while to realize that all this is not just the grapes, but also the fact that there is no press, no pumps, no refrigerator, no filtration, no oenological additives, no electricity – there is no mania for control: it is not you who wants to make the wine, but the wine that you want to make, the wine as it wants to be.

Fast forward to today, 2024.

In these last 10 years Ammàno has taught me to take a step back, to not want to impose myself on the wine, but to let the wine dictate the times and ways of my work. He has taught me to try to understand the vineyard, the grapes that give us, its tenacious and stubborn nature, its obstinacy, its desire to always survive, in the best possible way, even in the worst years.
I owe my entire journey as a winemaker to him.
The choice of a respectful and delicate agriculture, my journey into biodynamics.

Today Ammàno is a certainty. For me, first of all, and then also for many other people.
Ammàno is the reason why, after years of work, the most beautiful awards arrive. Snail of Slow Wine, for example, which has just been reconfirmed in the 2025 Guide, and above all the testimonies of many who drink it, perhaps without having ever heard of it before, and who send me an email, or who come to visit me in the cellar.