Feudo Montoni

Feudo Montoni
Cammarata, Sicily, Italy

In the early 2010s there was a restaurant in Chelsea called Eolo: Sicilia a Tavola. The chef and owner was Melissa Muller, a New Yorker whose grandmother came from a Sicilian village of six hundred people, and who spent every childhood summer there. Eolo was purely Sicilian, down to a wine list that carried nothing else and earned a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence four years running. The dish I cannot forget is her casarecce with fava beans and fresh ricotta, twisted noodles holding tender favas, olive oil, garlic, and wild herbs, the ricotta cutting the earthy, faintly bitter edge of the beans. With that plate Melissa put a white wine in front of me I had never heard of. Catarratto, from an estate called Feudo Montoni in the island's high interior. I have been drinking it ever since.

Eolo is gone now, and the reason it closed is the best part of the story. While researching her cookbook, Sicily: The Cookbook: Recipes Rooted in Traditions, Melissa traveled the island and visited Feudo Montoni, where she met the winemaker, Fabio Sireci. She went back and forth between two lives for a while, then chose one. She married Fabio, left New York, and moved to the center of Sicily. Today she co-manages the estate's global sales and commercial work, and the two of them are in the United States often for the trade. I have been trying to cook that fava dish ever since, and with her book I get close. What I cannot reproduce is the way her kitchen served it. The chef who first put this wine in front of me now helps run the estate that makes it.

Feudo Montoni dates to 1469. Rosario Sireci bought the property in the late 1800s after discovering the wealth of ancient vines growing there, and passed it to his son Elio, who passed it to Fabio, the third generation. Fabio trained as an engineer and could have taken a career on the mainland. He came back to the farm instead and learned winemaking at his father's side. His and Melissa's two sons are the fourth generation.

The estate sits in the high interior between Palermo and Agrigento, with vineyards climbing toward 2,300 feet, fanned by winds off the Madonie and Sicani mountains. For centuries the vineyards have been surrounded by durum wheat fields that act as a natural barrier, an island within an island. The farming is certified organic and older than the certification. Nothing is fertilized. Fava beans and peas are sown between the rows to fix nitrogen in the soil, the same beans at the center of the dish that started this story. Sicily's reputation is heat, ripeness, and weight. Montoni's altitude and isolation produce the opposite: freshness, acidity, and restraint.

The Masso vineyard takes its name from the rocky, sandy, iron-rich stone it grows in. It sits at 700 meters, facing east, planted to Catarratto vines now more than fifty years old, grafted by hand onto wild rootstock in the old Sicilian manner. Catarratto is the most planted white grape on the island, concentrated in the west and mostly anonymous. Grown here, in the center, at elevation, on that iron and sand, it becomes something else entirely. This is the argument for the cru concept Fabio works by: one vineyard, one grape, bottled on its own because the ground earns it.

A private visit to Feudo Montoni is not a tasting room stop. Visits are by appointment only and built around the family's table, in the middle of an estate the Sirecis have farmed for three generations.

From The Cellar

2024  Catarratto del Masso, Feudo Montoni
This wine is a great case for why altitude and soil matter more than a grape's reputation. Citrus and mountain herbs over a saline, mineral finish, with acidity that keeps every glass asking for the next one. It is light to medium in body and completely unforced. Most Catarratto disappears into blends and bulk. This one comes off a single iron-rich vineyard at 700 meters, and you taste the address, not the variety.

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