Postcard: Sicilia

Grapevines. Olive trees. Brown hills. Blue skies. The Med.

Equally enticing is the local cuisine – heavy with clams, swordfish and sardine, the generosity and simplicity utterly addictive.

As for local wines – well, Marsala is not all that far from here and Pantelleria is a ferry ride away, marking sweet wines the most interesting in this part of Sicily. Nero d’Avola is what’s being planted locally though, as the world’s thirst for rich, good value, full flavoured Sicilian Nero only increases.

Again, the contradiction though- Nero doesn’t work at all with local fish-heavy food, making it just as contradictory as the sight I saw yesterday – a farmer in his clapped out tractor, holding up a long line of traffic heading to the beach…