May 21, 2025 • 50 mins
When do you know it's time to take the leap to follow your passion? For Culinary Anthropologist Melissa Muller, traveling to Sicily to research her family roots and Sicilian foods for her NYC restaurants and book, "Sicily: Recipes Rooted in Tradition," inspired her to leave the U.S. and move to Sicily. And love. Melissa and husband, Fabio Sireci oversee the Sireci family's historic Feudo Montoni, an organic winery-farm in Central Sicily. She discusses Feudo Montoni's wines and Sicilian foods.
Fearless Fabulous You is broadcast live Wednesdays at 12 Noon ET on W4WN Radio - Women 4 Women Network (www.w4wn.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com).
Fearless Fabulous You Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
Fearless Fabulous You is broadcast live Wednesdays at 12 Noon ET on W4WN Radio - Women 4 Women Network (www.w4wn.com) part of Talk 4 Radio (www.talk4radio.com) on the Talk 4 Media Network (www.talk4media.com).
Fearless Fabulous You Podcast is also available on Talk 4 Media (www.talk4media.com), Talk 4 Podcasting (www.talk4podcasting.com), iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Pandora, Spotify, Audible, and over 100 other podcast outlets.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
The topics and opinions expressed on the following show are
solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not
those of W four WN Radio It's employees or affiliates.
We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services,
or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability,
explicit or implied shall be extended to W four WN
Radio It's employees or affiliates. Any questions or comment should
(00:21):
be directed to those show hosts.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Thank you for choosing W four WN Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Many of you follow my husband David Ransom and I
as we travel throughout Sicily and Italy and Europe, and
we love Sicily and this show is dedicated to Sicily
because we can't get enough of it, and apparently America
and cannot get enough of Sicily either, because there have
(01:03):
been numerous shows about Sicily, White Lotus being the most
recent that have attracted people to Sicily. But there is
a lot of Sicily to discover and a lot of
people just head straight to the coast. Well, my guest
today is going to show you not only how beautiful
(01:24):
Sicily is coast to coast, but where she lives is
in the center the heart of Sicily and truly one
of the most beautiful and pure areas I have visited.
The winery is called Fayuda Montoni and Melissa Mueller is
the co proprietor with her husband Fabio Suretchi. She is
(01:48):
not only a co proprietor, but she had formerly owned
a couple of restaurants dedicated to Sicilian food in New
York and the author of a terrific book on Sicily
called Sicil Recipes Rooted in Tradition. Having come to know
Melissa and having visited theyd Montoni myself, we can share
(02:09):
with you the fact that she is probably one of
the most knowledgeable people on Sicilian food and culture today.
And you are going to love this show because we're
going to dive into and take you by the hand
through the airwaves to Sicily so you can experience it
and think about what you can do to enjoy Sicily
in your home, but also plan a visit. Melissa. Welcome.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
Thank you, Melanie. It's such an honor to be on
your show, and also I'm very touched and flattered by
your lovely introduction.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Well, you have an amazing background, so we always like
to start with that you grew up in America, but
you have Sicilian heritage, So talk about your childhood and
your heritage and how you ended up finding that powerful
reconnection back to your roots.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Well, I must say that my whole life has revolved
around either from living here now for the past ten years,
or just when I was away or what I call
in exile from Sicily and growing up in the New York,
New Jersey area, where I basically dedicated everything in my
life to the island of Sicily. From a very young age,
(03:17):
I grew up coming every summer to my grandmother's village,
which is in the province of Agrigento on the southern
coast of Sicily, a small village called Santana, small in
the sense there's about four hundred inhabitants. It's a direct
contrast to Manhattan, where I grew up. Basically, the love
of Sicily that I have comes from that young age,
(03:40):
and as a child, I wanted to recreate in our
home the perfumes and the smells and the sensations that
I felt around Sicily. So I started cooking at a
very young age, and my love of ingredients and recipes
starts at that time. But Then as I grew up,
I realized that I want to focus more on the
(04:02):
culture and the food culture of Sicily, not just on
ingredients and on cooking, but basically, what I felt was
that food and Sicilian food was a means for me
to understand the culture and the history of these people
that I felt so connected with. So I started studying
(04:22):
anthropology with a focus on Mediterranean food culture. And I
say Mediterranean because I felt to understand Sicily, I needed
to look at it in its broad context. So I
studied all the various regions and history and culture surrounding Sicily,
not only Sicily itself. The love of Sicily only kept growing.
(04:43):
So when I finished my undergrad degree, before I moved
on to my postgraduate degree, my goal was to somehow
find a way to represent Sicily. I started writing, I
started looking at different ways to do so. But September
eleventh happened and I was torn. And so many restaurants,
as we all know in Manhattan, couldn't make it at
(05:05):
that time, and there was a very small restaurant on
Bleeker Street, Bleeker and McDougall in the village that was
for sale, and I came home to my father My
father was a lawyer. His dream for me was to
after my undergrad degree, to obviously get my law degree
and work with him. I'm an only child, and that
(05:25):
was his vision in his dream. But I knew that,
and I felt inside me that that wasn't my calling
and I wanted to focus on representing Sicily. I still
didn't exactly know how, but when September eleventh happened and
the possibility to open a restaurant, it seemed like a
joke almost in my home, but I announced that I'm
going to open a restaurant on Bleaker Street, and that's
(05:48):
how I got involved in the restaurant business. With this
opportunity to open very small restaurant where I cooked dishes
that I had grown up with, it was like a
laboratory for me, a place that I could experiment every
thing I had studied and show people that Sicily and
Sicilian food is not spaghetti and meatballs, is not a
scene from the Godfather film. It's a with no disrespect
(06:11):
to a film that's artistically beautiful and well made, but
that's not what Sicily is. So I felt that that
was my calling to change that stereotype, and in my
small part I think I contributed to that. After the
first restaurant, the lease had finished there and I decided
to start my post graduate studies. At the same time, though,
(06:33):
I was so driven to still be in the restaurant
business because I loved so much this idea of representing Sicily,
and also I enjoyed the interaction with fellow New Yorkers
and creating relationships with people in the neighborhood and sharing
the dishes with them and my stories about Sicily. For me,
everything is about telling the stories and explaining the sensations
(06:57):
and the emotions of Sicily. So time will take. I
opened up a second restaurant, Aolo, which was in Chelsea
on the seventh Avenue and twenty first Street, and then
after that a third restaurant called Pastaill on ninth Avenue.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
What was the name of the first restaurant, signal Melissa.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
The first restaurant was called Ostidia that Galloneto. There was
a whole story behind that, the black Rooster, which technically
is associated with Tuscany, but it was a story that
led back to my childhood in Sicily, and I cooked
the dishes that I had grown up with basically, but
it wasn't enough because I knew that in order to
represent Sicily, I needed to keep studying, keep researching, and
(07:36):
really turn back to the academic world and also a
world where I could represent a background and the ammunition
to be able to represent Sicily in terms of writing
in a way that was more writing for a public audience.
So that's where I studied at the Columbia University Journalism School.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
You know the fact that you have approached your life
and your life calling through family, heritage, cultural anthropology and
writing all connected through food. You know, it's interesting your
life could be a movie. There are a lot of
movies that have been filmed in Sicily, and what you
said that kind of was interesting to me is growing up,
(08:20):
the image of Sicily was not always positive. You know,
The Godfather wonderful movie, but you know it's about the mafia,
and you know, Sicily was portrayed as poor, corrupt, beautiful,
but there were problems and unfortunately it also translated to
other aspects of business there. Obviously, the mafia, as I
(08:41):
learned because we went to the No Mafia Museum in Palermo,
did have an ironclad control over Sicily until finally it
was driven out it's sadly somewhere else, but and a
lot of I also learned they have these wineries that
were recaptured and reclassified that were formerly owned by the money.
There was a huge amount of change that happened Sicily
(09:04):
during this time, and during your research also underwent a
bit of a revolution in terms of coming to Reckoning
with itself as a place to visit and its industry
in the wine industry for sure, in the tourism and others.
A lot of things changed to help change that image.
And thankfully more and positive things are being shown and
(09:26):
written about Sicily, and the movies are great, and everybody's
saying in Indiana Jones And as you did your reason,
what did you learn that changed about Sicily? What stay
the same, but also what changed for the good?
Speaker 4 (09:36):
Well, I remember we could just go back a little
bit to when I had the second restaurant. I opened
up the restaurant saying it's a Sicilian restaurant with classic
Sicilian dishes and the wineless that was only exclusively Sicilian.
And now we're talking about twenty ten, twenty eleven, and
at the time I would say about half of the
people that came would get up from the table, go
(09:59):
to the near liquor store and purchase a bottle of
Chianti or Brunello or a wine that was non Sicilian
and come back to pay the corkage fee because they
were so uninterested in what I mean. It was amazing,
and I was very discouraged initially because I said, I
want to only represent Sicily and here people don't even
(10:23):
want to try the Sicilian wines. Then after the first
few years, there was this major shift because all of
a sudden, Sicilian wines became the wines to try. The
media was full of talking about Sicilian wines, especially with
giving a focus to Edna, and all of a sudden
things changed and people would come and search out the
(10:44):
restaurant just because I had the Sicilian wine list. And
I found that very interesting because it really is something
that reflects also the tourism of today. It's the re
creating of what Sicily is. And like you said, there's
the show that the White the White Lotus that's contributed
to a lot of tourism. It's the way that it's
(11:05):
now being represented, and it's completely different than the what
I had studied and what I had put together from
the past decade of of what houses to house, Sicily
was represented. So I think that today there's such a
major fluctuation of tourism to the islands and everyone wanting
to come here. However, it's the coastal areas that get
(11:28):
the tourism. Where we live is in the center of
the island, where our farm is, where in the mountains
of the center of Sicily, and it's absolutely an area
where tourists don't come, but you do see people come
that want to explore, that want to really get to
know what the old Sicily was and is today.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Well, I've actually spent more time in the center of
Sicily than in the coasts because I'm blessed to go
on wine trips that have taken me there. You met
your husband, you were buying his wine, right.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
What happened was I was researching for my book and
I wanted to visit wineries in different areas. For example,
I didn't know that Sicily has nine provinces. I knew
my area of Sicily. I had, of course done so
much research, but I really needed to get to know
first hand all the different areas in order to be
able to represent it in a book form. Because Rizzoli
(12:23):
said to me, can you write an encyclopedia about Sicilian cuisine,
to which I answered no, because an encyclopedia would take
one hundred volumes and multiple lifetimes. But I can write
a good summary of what it is. But in order
to do that, I realized that I needed to really travel,
and with the restaurants, it wasn't easy, but every two
(12:43):
months I would leave and come to Sicily for ten
days and do very intense research trips. So if I
would go to an area that I didn't know where
the best honeymaker was or where the cheese was made,
I would stop first at the different wineries. So I
visited so many wineries, of which I had the wines
at my restaurant with failed in Montoni. I was introduced
(13:05):
to the wines. The first time I tried the Rucara
and Nero Davola was through master of wine Bill Nesto
and his wife Francis di Savino, who wrote the World
of Sicilian Wine, And as they were releasing the book,
they came to eat at my restaurant and brought me
a bottle, and they were enjoying a bottle of the
wine at their table and had me taste it with them,
(13:27):
and I remember feeling that it was so different, this freshness.
It didn't feel like a Sicilian wine. So I was
very struck by it, and I had to come to Montoni.
I knew that sooner or later that was part of
my agenda for my research for the book. And my husband,
of course at the time, wasn't my husband. He kept
saying no, because when the importer at the time would
(13:49):
say there's someone writing a book, he would say, well,
I don't you know, I really don't have time because
he's very hands on on the farm in the vineyards.
And for about two years that meeting never happened, and
I didn't know he was saying no. I didn't even
know he was the didn't know he was here. I
just knew it was failed to Montoni that I was visiting.
And that day, of course changed my life because my
(14:13):
first moment of meeting him was also my first moment
of meeting failed to Montoni and meeting the land of
failed to Montoni, where I felt that I just couldn't
leave and I fell in love with him, which took
time of the two of us getting to know each other.
It was love at first sight that it was getting
to know each other over a long period of time,
(14:33):
especially from a distance, but Montoni was That feeling of
seeing Montoni could never never leave my heart. And I
remember one day he said to me, after about a
year and a half of us knowing each other through
telephone calls and through multiple visits for the book, he
said to me, if you really want to visit for
the harvest? Because I expressed a desire to come to
(14:55):
visit for the harvest, He said, the only way to
understand what that even means is to spend three hundred
and sixty five days a year and to live every
day on the farm and to understand the culmination which
is this harvest. And of course it was a love
proposal on his end, but it was so true because
(15:16):
every day counts into what goes into the great harvest,
the wines being made, and to this sale of the
wines that we craft here. So I'm glad I took
him up on his offer.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
And how long ago was that, Melissa.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
It was about a decade ago, nearly close to a
decade ago at this point now.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
And the pun Tooni is like one of the most
ancient wineries in Sicily. You're talking about quite old, dating
to fourteen sixty nine, so we're in it. And the
property is an estate, a beautiful estate that you've lovingly
kept renovated or it's an ongoing love of renovation, as
we saw them move there. How did Babia's found they
(16:00):
come to own Fyoda Montani.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Well, like you said, the wideries founded in fourteen sixty nine,
and it was founded by a noble family. At the time,
Sicily was under Aragonese rule. It passed hands many times,
always within the aristocratic realm, and the owner prior to
Fabio's grandfather was a baron who was the Cardinal of Catania.
(16:30):
He also owned lands on Edna and around around Syracuse,
Syracusa Syracuse, and he sold the property to my husband's
grandfather in the late eighteen hundreds. Basically at the time,
this was right after unification of Italy, and there was
(16:50):
a major decadence and fall of the aristocratic class and
the rise of the bourgeois class of the working class
of of of Sicily. So it was possible at that
time for and what happened often was large faiotos, which
(17:13):
are failed me comes from the word feudalism. So basically
of the basically where large expanses of land we were
under control, under the control of one owner, he became
he became the owner of the land and basically then
he passed that into the hands of my father in law.
(17:36):
And then now the third generation is is Godvil.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
And this is uh. The wines are extraordinary, and I'm
going to underscore that. You do not tasted a lot
of Sicilian wines, and universally everybody goes wow because there
is such a sense of place. And when you're sipping
the wines of Foto Montoni, you're sipping a sense of place.
But that also goes to everything there. Because we had
lunch with you as the food was you did this
(18:03):
amazing Sicilian lunch. I'm still thinking about it because I'm
craving the foods of Sicily right now on wines, which
once I said before we started going on air, we're
kind of in a food desert here when it comes
to certain types of food where we're living temporarily right now.
What percentage of your working farm is dedicated to your vineyards,
(18:23):
but also what else do you cultivate? Because you are
a full working farm and it is all hands on.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
It's all very hands on here on the farm. A
third of the land is dedicated to the vineyard, so
you can imagine it like the vineyard in the center,
and then it's surrounded by a ring that is grain
fields that we rotate with lagoon fields like lentils and
like chickpeas. All the grains we only grow heritage grains.
(18:52):
I should also say that we're very rigorously an organic farm,
so that is very influential on our decisions of what
we grow, how and how we grow them. So hence
the heritage grange, which which do very well in organic.
We also cultivate tomatoes and with the grain we make pasta.
(19:12):
We also have olive groves. So I could go on
and on. There's many different realities here on the farm,
but yet everything is run by Fabio and I with
a lot of love and a lot of time and
all of our energy put into it.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
How do you dividing up your recession's abilities because you're
also you also are parents to two young children.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Yes, we're parents to Ellio and Francesco, who are three
years old and one year old respectively. Through not even
three Elio and they just thrive on the farm. You
can imagine we have a beach home and we could
be at the beach every day. And of course Fabio
(19:54):
and I want to be on Fabio and I want
to be on the farm, and we want to check
the vindear to day and check the fields and be
a part of it actively. And we don't want to
we don't want to manage it from afar. That's not
what we what we intend to do. But you could
see even in Elio, who is so young, but he
loves it. He doesn't care about being at the beach.
(20:15):
He wants to be in the land and on the
farm and with his little hoe in the vineyard. Or
today he helped us, be helped in what he could do,
but he helped us with loading a container of wine
that was leaving for New York. And it's just beautiful
to see his being so active and excited about being
(20:38):
part of the farm.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Well, I want to touch on the wine and the food.
I'm going to start with the wine because I actually
your wines are widely available in the United States and
we taste it through many and you have I mean,
what's interesting is there are vines that are pre phyloccera.
I mean, you know, very old vine wines. For someone
who listeners who may be somewhat familiar with Sicilia wines,
(21:08):
let's talk about a few of the wines. Most, because
Wilson Daniels is your importer and I'm on the site,
are available here. But let's talk about some given your
location in Sicily. But some of the wines are that
set you feel set feud to Montonia part Obviously, I
(21:29):
reference the prefiloza vine, the Vercora Brucaro, which is.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
One sure, so the Prefiloxa vines are. It's very interesting
because these are vines that were on the property when
my when Fabio's grandfather purchased the land in the end
of the eighteen hundreds, so they are very old vines
that still produce and actually produce a fair amount of grapes.
(21:56):
There Netto Davola grapes and we have some pre Philoxa vines.
Of all of the different types of grapes that we
grow on the property, the only one that we have
an abundance of or two hectores of that we can
bottle is the Neto davola.
Speaker 5 (22:14):
But there's also cateralto and in Zolia and Petticne and
Nello Mascales interestingly enoughales because.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
Of course it's it's associated with Etna. Correct, But those
vines were brought here when the Cardinal of Catania who
owned the lands, the prior owner, when he owned the
lands on Itna, he had an agronomist who worked for him,
and the agronomist was also a priest father Nellia, which
interestingly means fog in Italian. He would go back and
(22:51):
forth with vines from here, which the nea is known
as calabrese, and he would bring those Calabrese vines to
the Edna and then Siracus area, and he brought ned
alo mascales here. Interesting, and today we produce wines that
are from vines that were grafted off the Prefiloxada, the
(23:12):
Prefiloxa nedal mascales and vines. It's very unusual and it
has a different expression here than it doesn't, but it
has maybe a little less austere, a little more floral notes.
You can feel it's ned aalo mascales. You can see
it in the color and in the and in the
the body and the style of the wine. But it's
(23:34):
but definitely has some notes that that distinguish it from
being a ned Ala Mascaleese from Edna. And we we
finally started bottling that that wine because my husband was
a little bit he wasn't so sure about doing so.
He didn't want to be in competition with with Thattna.
But it was the wine that his father always unified
(23:56):
and loved to drink. He said, my father in law
would say, I love it because it's a wine that
doesn't stain the glass. And now fifty years later, we're
making that wine that doesn't stain the glass. And we
called it Terre di Elio, which means the lands of Elio,
which was my father in law's name, but it's also
our first son's name. And the first vintage we've unified
(24:19):
that we commercialized, I should say, because every year we
always made a little of it, but the first vintage
that we made enough of to bottle and commercialize was
the twenty twenty when Elio was born.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
Well, I remember sitting outside. We started our day just
to paint a picture, sitting out on your patio till
it started to rain, and I remember having the Nairello
moscal ezi rose d'adell sicilian. We had that beautiful rose,
and we tasted some whites before we went inside, and
(24:52):
it is like a farmhouse inside, and you prepared this
incredible meal, and when we were there, it was I
think May spring and spring season. Yes, for those who are,
you know, less familiar with some of the and as
you said, a long time ago, no one seemed to
know the foods of Sicily. We are now talking in
(25:15):
it's early it's August September area, and harvest is starting,
and eggplant season is upon us and tomatoes are being
made into pulp.
Speaker 4 (25:25):
What are some.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Dishes, foods and dishes that you feel are essential to
Sicily that everyone should think about whether they're visiting or
are featured in your book, because the book really takes
you through Sicily, but from where you are, well, I.
Speaker 4 (25:43):
Think that in terms of what is traditional, it's a
complicated question because when we look at the island, there's
so many different realities. We're here in the center where
a mountainous air where nearly eight hundred meters above sea level,
(26:05):
and everything that I grow here in my vegetable garden,
and everything just comes out so fresh and so flavorful
because we have these we do have the hot Sicilian sun,
but we also have the nights that are very cool,
so it's very ideal for growing all year round for
the for the vegetable garden. And what I feel is
(26:29):
that in other areas it's different. For example, in the
southeastern coast, I look more at the tomatoes and things
that are more intensely, very concentrated in flavor. In this area,
I like the the things that are more green, for example.
Also the wild vegetables and the wild herbs are very interesting,
(26:50):
which grow all throughout Sicily, but here in this mountainous
area it's quite abundant. So my cuisine very much reflects
this center area of Sicily, not only in terms of
the vegetables and the produce that's available, but this is
an area that's very rich and full of full of
(27:13):
animals for cheesemaking, because it's one of the only vineyards.
Only the closest vineyard is Regalliali, which is about twenty
eight to thirty kilometers distance from us. But in this
area it's mainly grain field. This was the classic grainary
of the Roman Empire center of Sicily, and so we're
(27:36):
full of sheep and goats and also cows and the
cheesemaking is just amazing. So when I look at ingredients
to cook with, I have this fresh produce, like you said,
egg plants right now, or the Sicilian zucchini, the long
zucchini squash, the leaves of the zucchini plant called tendumi.
(28:00):
Basically whatever is is fresh and growing. But also I
like to use the elements, the traditional elements from the
the animals of the of the territory produced. And the
recipes I've now pretty much followed very much old recipes
that are dying out and recipes that are hard to
(28:21):
hard to even replicate anymore. And those are the ones
that I love to I love to make it home.
But they're all driven by simple ingredients. We grow the chickpeas,
lentils every year. We've now we're now harvesting fair amount.
Just last week we harvested and it was quite abundant.
And it's interesting because every year they taste different. There's
(28:44):
really a vintage of the taste of the beans. And
if you taste one next to each other, you'd understand
what I mean. Because every year the climate is different,
the land is different, and that's reflected in the taste
of the foods. So what is Sicilian cuisine. We would
be talking for hours about the history of Sicily, about
(29:06):
the culture of each different area, the geography of the
different area, and then of the different social classes, because
there's so much mix within Sicily, from the peasant cuisine
to the aristocratic cuisine. And how interestingly enough, the peasant
cuisine very much often reflects dishes that come from the
(29:27):
aristocratic cuisine. For example, there's a dish that's called sard
a becafico, which basically means sardines cooked in the way
of the little birds that are called becafico. The aristocratic
recipe was that they were little birds. They were not sardines.
There were little birds that were stuffed and stuffed with
(29:50):
bread crumbs and pine nuts and raisins and cheese and
then roasted. The peasant version was to take what was abundant.
If you put a net in the sea, especially in
the springtime, you'll be you'll fill up that net easily
with with sardines. So that abundance was then translated into
(30:11):
a copying of a dish that was part of part
of an aristocratic cuisine. And there's just so many of
those type of examples. There's another examples with caponata. Caponata
comes from the word cappone, is the name of a
fish similar to a small like a machi machi in
(30:35):
terms of the flesh, and caponata was first made with
that fish, not red with egg plants. But today it's
known if you say caponata, everyone knows that that means
egg plants, right, But that's not the origin of the dish.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
That's interesting, and it sounds like capon which is a
rooster to us.
Speaker 4 (30:56):
Yeah, but it's capone from pesche Capona, the rooster is
a different word in sic and Italian.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
It's interesting when I think of recent visits to Sicily
and also to the southern parts of Italy. I've got eggplant,
and I grew up I hated eggplant as a child,
hated it, but I actually love it after going to
Italy and specifically to Sicily and to Campana, which I
think I had some of the best eggplant dishes of
(31:26):
my life.
Speaker 4 (31:27):
Sure, sure, yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
And yet a lot of people are tendated to use
eggplant cook with egg plant the United States.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
I feel that a home cook in Sicily probably knows
about this is something I've said often, but at least
you need to know a hundred ways of how to
cook with egg clant as in a Sicilian home, because
right now, I mean, as we speak, this morning I
picked I can't tell you how many egg plants, and
(31:56):
there's more tomorrow to pick, and more than the next day,
and I'll be every day. It can't be done in
the same recipe. Tonight, I'm roasting them in the oven,
very simply, just the very small I harvest them when
they're really small, cut them in half, and then cut
little inserts into them, and put pieces of garlic, pieces
(32:17):
of raw garlic, some mint, some very age cheese, very
harsh spicy age cheese, and lots of olive oil and
parsley as well along with the mint, and then just
roast them in the oven. And they're just fabulous. So
that's tonight's dinner. We'll have to see for tomorrow. I
(32:40):
was thinking of making an egg clant parmigiana, which the
classic recipe here is just slicing them with skin off
in this case, slicing them, frying them, and then topping
them with some tomato sauce of course, homemade tomato sauce,
a basa leaf, and then just a sprinkle of age
(33:03):
cheese on top.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
But why would you have with that, Melissa?
Speaker 4 (33:07):
Oh, let's see with that, I'd probably have our nusa,
which is uh which comes from vines that are thirty
five year old vines that were grafted from the prefiloxide
of the mother plants. It's not a whe it's not
(33:29):
a dish to pair with the brukata because the prefiloxida,
which needs something more more hefty and more something meaty,
usually make the lamb or the roasted goat when we
have the brucata the the We also produce a wine
(33:52):
called petticone, which is quite which is it's fuller and
more spicy, and that that I usually pair when I
when I make our homemade sausage, which I make nice
full of pepper and full of black pepper and wild fennel.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
When you cook, do you think about obviously you cook
for the season. Do you think about the wine or
do you know when you think about the wine when
you're cooking? Or does that I think we do. I'll
give you an example. We had a roustane. We had
a roussan and the refrigerator last night and I just
all I could do was think about that wine, and
there was nothing in the refrigerator to eat that would
satisfy what I wanted with that wine. I ended up
(34:29):
going out and picking up because we kind of live
in a food does it right now? I end up
picking up this wonderful ty curry and spicy papaya salad
because that's all I wanted with that wine. And so
often when we cook, I think about what the wine
is first versus what we have, although sometimes it's just
what we happen to have in the refrigerator, and how
can we make it more creative and less every day?
Because I think that's a challenge for a lot of people's,
(34:51):
like you know, you have an abundance of eggplant, or
abundance of beans, or abundance of zucchini. How to make
it different every day? But when we cook, we think
about the wine just because we're wine.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
No, absolutely, absolutely we do too. But I think that
I think of it as almost like an ingredient in
the dish. So I'm cooking and then thinking pairing to
me is just basically adding another ingredient into the dish,
if that makes sense, And so probably I think about,
(35:22):
you know, what I'm cooking first, and then the wine
comes from there. We also, of course we drink our
We drink our own wines a lot also because we
always do different tastings and we have bottles open, so
we're always tasting our wines. But we also really love
to taste wines from around the world, so it's become
(35:43):
a bit of a hobby of ours and and whatt
You's that also, oh gosh, so much. I mean, we're Barolo,
we love and the Burgundy. It's everything is intriguing. German whites,
(36:04):
Austrian whites. We basically have a little bit of everything
in our little wine cellar. And when we have a
dish that's interesting, we figure out what to open and
what to pair with it. But there's a fun fine,
that's for sure.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Well yeah, because listen, dinner doesn't taste good with water.
Let's be real. I understand you have a vineyard project.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
So the vineyard at the moment is forty four hectors,
and we just this year just planted the wild vines
for another eight hectors of vineyard. I think you might
have when yeah, when you came in May, you saw
the baby vines.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
Twenty four hectors is fairly large just for everybody who
doesn't know. Now, that's about one hundred and eight acres.
Speaker 4 (36:51):
It's fairly large. I mean taking into consideration that we're
a family winery because we're basically a meat small small
to medium sized winery, but still completely family operated. And
it's we have the requests for the wines, and we
(37:15):
realized that we needed to we needed to expand just
a little bit. So this year we added the eight hectors.
What we do here is that first we plant wild vines.
So in January we planted those wild vines. Wild vines
do not produce grapes. So next week, not even this
(37:36):
is Saturday, it's when two days from now, a group
of grafters and the average age is seventy eight years old.
Of the group of grafters who come, there's five of them.
And it's very hard to find grafters nowadays because it's
absolutely a dying art. Because if you, for the most part,
(37:57):
when someone wants to plant a new vineyard, you go
to the nursery garden, or you take the catalog from
a nursery garden and you pick out which, let's say,
clone of Netodaba you'd like, you read the description, you'd
like it to be more disease resistant, or one that
works better at a high altitude, or one that has
more taste of cherry, or so forth. Here Montoni, the
(38:20):
objective is to look at the past in order to
make decisions for the future. That's my husband's motto and
that's become mine as well. And what we very consciously
decided was if we plant a new vineyard, and when
we do so, it has to be planted grafted from
the old plants. That means that we continue the genetic
(38:43):
code of the old plants, which is a genetic code
that's unique to Montoni. Especially. There's there's been research done
on neo davola which is quite interesting. There were thirty
different specimens of neo davola from around Sicily to and
within that thirty fifteen different clones were identified. And that
(39:07):
was only thirty taken, so you can imagine if that
was expanded. So fifty percent is very very high percentage.
And the clone that's here at Montoni is of the
nettle dabola or of the nettle mascalase or so forth,
is what we want to carry forward genetically. So the
(39:27):
only way to do so, of course, is to not
purchase vines from the nursery garden and two graft onto
the to the wild vines. So it's an amazing scene.
I'll send you pictures, Melanie from the over the next
few days, because the whole work job needs to be
done within a ten to ten day window. Well, the
(39:50):
grafters will come, they'll take the pieces of the of
the old vines. And what's interesting is we're grafting a
part of the vineyard at the highest point. We're grafting
from old vines that we are researching right now. We
don't even know the name of the old vines. There's
(40:11):
some red and some white vines that we are not
sure even what they are, the very old to uh
to the land, and we're grafting from them a part
of the of the vineyard.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
Well, you know, Melissa, I'm on your website Feyoda Montoni
I T and you have a wonderful video explanation of this.
I love it because it says, basically as you said,
you can set up a vineyard with two roads to follow.
You buy the plants from the nursery or you propagate
the ancient vines from your vineyards. And that is like
for someone who's not in the wine business doesn't understand that.
(40:48):
It's like if you had the mother of a very
fine balsamic vinegar, when to make a really fine balsamic vinegar,
you'd have to start with the mother and you have
to propagate. And that's really what you're doing, is you're
propagating and keep and that is something very unique to
Fayouda Montoni. I want to underscore that like fifty times
because it is it is labor intensive. I'm kind of
(41:10):
blown away that that they're seventy eight years old and
what happens when they die out. But basically you're taking,
as you said, the genetic code and that takes time.
So when you're doing that, now, when will you actually
see vines producing fruit?
Speaker 4 (41:26):
Well, by next year? What comes up is the is
what's been grafted on, So in terms of variety, would
be already the plant by next year will that grows
will be the variety that we that we uh graft
onto the wild plant. By the time we see fruit
(41:46):
could be let's say the second year that it's planted.
But we cut off those those clusters, So we'll cut
them off in order to strengthen the roots of those vines.
We'll do that for a few years. So the first
sign of of of grapes that we could could look
at will be about five years down the road. But
(42:08):
it's it's really for a long term project. It's a
it's a vineyard that we planted so so that our
sons can have can can can harvest the fruits as
they grow up. Because it's really, uh, it's a project
that we look at. It's a four year project. It's
not it's not something that you look at for so
(42:31):
next year we're already already making wine.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Well, I think it's important. This is this is a
labor of love. This is you know, looking at the
genetics of wine. And it is not like the wine
that are most people in the United States are seeing
on shelves supermarkets, which is you know, like the equivalent
of fast food wine half the time. This is wine
that is you know, they're slow cooking. This is slow
(42:57):
cultivation and evolution of of of of vine and it's
quite fascinating and like a lot of people don't understand that, but.
Speaker 4 (43:06):
This is how we do everything on the farm. It's
I know, of course you focus focus on the wine,
but that's the heritage grains. We save our grain year
to year. That's that's a strain of grain that it
is not found everywhere, and it's not a regular modern
version genetically modified Durham wheat. The tomatoes that the tomato
(43:30):
plants I have, the seeds that are from very old
old versions. Even the vinegar that I make that I
use in my kaponata has a mother mother vinegar that
came from my husband's great aunts, a great uncle's mother,
so it goes back over a century ago. That to
(43:53):
us is the basis of everything, and it's I don't
know if the excitement comes through in my voice, but
I how I could express that. It's just the driving
force between what we do, and it's what I could
only have dreamed of doing as a child, going back
to when I was twelve years old, cooking in our
(44:13):
home to fill the fill the home with the scent
of sicily. Today I'm able to do that, and today
I'm able to realize the realize those dreams. And it's
just a true blessing.
Speaker 3 (44:28):
You really are living the room. And David and I
were blessed because your son us once an incredible care
package with the most amazing pasta and chick We still
have some of those chickwas we actually, you know, we
fight over wind to use them because we keep we
want to hold on everything and honeys and the bront
these pistache Scilian pistachios and honey and everything. It's just amazing.
(44:48):
Can you do you? Can you do? You sell your products?
Is there a way for anyone in the United States
to get your food products? And you can get the wines,
but what about the food?
Speaker 4 (44:56):
Well, what we've done now is we've we've sold on
very smaller scale and to some of our partners around
the world that have organic shops or really focus on
the organic, especially with our olive oil or the lentils.
But we have made the decision to also package and
(45:17):
sell on the more small scale some of our some
of these products like the pastas, the tomato sauces. It's
just that it's we don't want it to take away
from our focus on the wine because it's in order
to make wine that to make good wine, it really
takes our dedication and being a family, family operated business.
(45:40):
It's those three hundred and sixty five days a year
and are not going to the beaches and are not
taking vacations, and it's this. It's full time dedicated to
that and to tasting all the tanks every ten days,
and to being a part of the seller operations day
(46:01):
to day. So our other products are where I have
a huge passion for them and I put I put
energy into them. But of course we don't want them
to to take away from our main focus, which which
is it's the wines, and that's why I do small scale.
So this year, in terms of tomatoes, I have one
(46:24):
hector of tomatoes planted. The lentils which are easier to
cultivate and easier to easier to manage on a large scale.
We we seeded the ten hectors more or less this year.
But everything has to be proportioned in order to keep
wind our focus.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
You know, I'm going to underscores we start to wind
down this wonderful conversation. This is a very special place
in the heart and soul and center of Italy, which I,
David and I are blessed to have visited. Blessed for
those of you who do decide to come to Italy,
whether you visit Fayota, Montoni or not, you can get
(47:06):
the wines in Italy and in the United States. But
when you travel. Wherever you travel, go off the beaten
track to the heart and soul of a region. Don't
just stay where all the tourists are on the coasts
or in the big city exactly, you won't meet the
real You'll see the soul, but you won't see the heart,
and that, I think is what it's special about Fayota Montoni.
(47:27):
There's a soul throughout Sicily, but you're in the heart.
It's a beating heart of what's happening and a living,
working farm and family. And I feel that's what I
felt when I was there.
Speaker 4 (47:38):
Well, your words are very beautiful and very touching to
me because it's exactly what I feel. But I'm not
always sure if everyone else feels the same. But the
fact that you felt that way when you came to
Feldo Montoni confirms how I feel about living here and
about dedicating my life to this land. And it's it's
(48:00):
also a life that's dedicated not only to this land,
but to this beating heart of Sicily that really needs
attention and really needs to be not forgotten, because if
anything about about the work we do, it's about bringing
life to the territory and not letting it be abandoned
(48:21):
because it could easily be so, but that's not That's
obviously not what our objective is. And I hope that
in my next book, which is basically it's basically all
of my field work. We could call it, but a
collection of my diaries from the past years, I hope
that I can best represent what this beating heart of
(48:43):
the of the core of Sicily means, and not only
what it means to me, but how it's a reflection
an example for the rest of the world in today's
modern world.
Speaker 3 (48:54):
Well, you're a beautiful writer. Again, I just want to
underscore that the book that is available right now is Sicily.
It's by Rissouli, The Cookbook, and it is fabulous. I
can't wait to read your next one. I love the
fact that you followed your heart to the place you
want to be, because that is what I'm all about,
is helping people follow their heart and live the life
(49:15):
they choose. And I love the fact that you've done that.
Thank you so much for joining me. I'm getting hungry
just thinking about everything. I can't wait to see you again,
see you and Fabia and the family again. Until then,
I toast to everything you're doing.
Speaker 4 (49:29):
Thank you, Melanie, and thank you for having me and
I warmly warmly welcome you and David back as soon
as possible. This is your retreat and wherever whenever you
want to come stay for an extended period of time,
You're more than welcome to do so.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
Thank you, I appreciate it. And good luck with harvest
this year, all right.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
Thank you, thank you. I'll keep you posted definitely with
some photographs as we graft and as we harvest.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
All right, thank you very much.
Speaker 4 (49:58):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
Stranded in the part of
Speaker 3 (50:13):
PA
The topics and opinions expressed on the following show are
solely those of the hosts and their guests, and not
those of W four WN Radio It's employees or affiliates.
We make no recommendations or endorsements for radio show programs, services,
or products mentioned on air or on our web. No liability,
explicit or implied shall be extended to W four WN
Radio It's employees or affiliates. Any questions or comment should
(00:21):
be directed to those show hosts.
Speaker 2 (00:22):
Thank you for choosing W four WN Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Many of you follow my husband David Ransom and I
as we travel throughout Sicily and Italy and Europe, and
we love Sicily and this show is dedicated to Sicily
because we can't get enough of it, and apparently America
and cannot get enough of Sicily either, because there have
(01:03):
been numerous shows about Sicily, White Lotus being the most
recent that have attracted people to Sicily. But there is
a lot of Sicily to discover and a lot of
people just head straight to the coast. Well, my guest
today is going to show you not only how beautiful
(01:24):
Sicily is coast to coast, but where she lives is
in the center the heart of Sicily and truly one
of the most beautiful and pure areas I have visited.
The winery is called Fayuda Montoni and Melissa Mueller is
the co proprietor with her husband Fabio Suretchi. She is
(01:48):
not only a co proprietor, but she had formerly owned
a couple of restaurants dedicated to Sicilian food in New
York and the author of a terrific book on Sicily
called Sicil Recipes Rooted in Tradition. Having come to know
Melissa and having visited theyd Montoni myself, we can share
(02:09):
with you the fact that she is probably one of
the most knowledgeable people on Sicilian food and culture today.
And you are going to love this show because we're
going to dive into and take you by the hand
through the airwaves to Sicily so you can experience it
and think about what you can do to enjoy Sicily
in your home, but also plan a visit. Melissa. Welcome.
Speaker 4 (02:30):
Thank you, Melanie. It's such an honor to be on
your show, and also I'm very touched and flattered by
your lovely introduction.
Speaker 3 (02:39):
Well, you have an amazing background, so we always like
to start with that you grew up in America, but
you have Sicilian heritage, So talk about your childhood and
your heritage and how you ended up finding that powerful
reconnection back to your roots.
Speaker 4 (02:57):
Well, I must say that my whole life has revolved
around either from living here now for the past ten years,
or just when I was away or what I call
in exile from Sicily and growing up in the New York,
New Jersey area, where I basically dedicated everything in my
life to the island of Sicily. From a very young age,
(03:17):
I grew up coming every summer to my grandmother's village,
which is in the province of Agrigento on the southern
coast of Sicily, a small village called Santana, small in
the sense there's about four hundred inhabitants. It's a direct
contrast to Manhattan, where I grew up. Basically, the love
of Sicily that I have comes from that young age,
(03:40):
and as a child, I wanted to recreate in our
home the perfumes and the smells and the sensations that
I felt around Sicily. So I started cooking at a
very young age, and my love of ingredients and recipes
starts at that time. But Then as I grew up,
I realized that I want to focus more on the
(04:02):
culture and the food culture of Sicily, not just on
ingredients and on cooking, but basically, what I felt was
that food and Sicilian food was a means for me
to understand the culture and the history of these people
that I felt so connected with. So I started studying
(04:22):
anthropology with a focus on Mediterranean food culture. And I
say Mediterranean because I felt to understand Sicily, I needed
to look at it in its broad context. So I
studied all the various regions and history and culture surrounding Sicily,
not only Sicily itself. The love of Sicily only kept growing.
(04:43):
So when I finished my undergrad degree, before I moved
on to my postgraduate degree, my goal was to somehow
find a way to represent Sicily. I started writing, I
started looking at different ways to do so. But September
eleventh happened and I was torn. And so many restaurants,
as we all know in Manhattan, couldn't make it at
(05:05):
that time, and there was a very small restaurant on
Bleeker Street, Bleeker and McDougall in the village that was
for sale, and I came home to my father My
father was a lawyer. His dream for me was to
after my undergrad degree, to obviously get my law degree
and work with him. I'm an only child, and that
(05:25):
was his vision in his dream. But I knew that,
and I felt inside me that that wasn't my calling
and I wanted to focus on representing Sicily. I still
didn't exactly know how, but when September eleventh happened and
the possibility to open a restaurant, it seemed like a
joke almost in my home, but I announced that I'm
going to open a restaurant on Bleaker Street, and that's
(05:48):
how I got involved in the restaurant business. With this
opportunity to open very small restaurant where I cooked dishes
that I had grown up with, it was like a
laboratory for me, a place that I could experiment every
thing I had studied and show people that Sicily and
Sicilian food is not spaghetti and meatballs, is not a
scene from the Godfather film. It's a with no disrespect
(06:11):
to a film that's artistically beautiful and well made, but
that's not what Sicily is. So I felt that that
was my calling to change that stereotype, and in my
small part I think I contributed to that. After the
first restaurant, the lease had finished there and I decided
to start my post graduate studies. At the same time, though,
(06:33):
I was so driven to still be in the restaurant
business because I loved so much this idea of representing Sicily,
and also I enjoyed the interaction with fellow New Yorkers
and creating relationships with people in the neighborhood and sharing
the dishes with them and my stories about Sicily. For me,
everything is about telling the stories and explaining the sensations
(06:57):
and the emotions of Sicily. So time will take. I
opened up a second restaurant, Aolo, which was in Chelsea
on the seventh Avenue and twenty first Street, and then
after that a third restaurant called Pastaill on ninth Avenue.
Speaker 3 (07:10):
What was the name of the first restaurant, signal Melissa.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
The first restaurant was called Ostidia that Galloneto. There was
a whole story behind that, the black Rooster, which technically
is associated with Tuscany, but it was a story that
led back to my childhood in Sicily, and I cooked
the dishes that I had grown up with basically, but
it wasn't enough because I knew that in order to
represent Sicily, I needed to keep studying, keep researching, and
(07:36):
really turn back to the academic world and also a
world where I could represent a background and the ammunition
to be able to represent Sicily in terms of writing
in a way that was more writing for a public audience.
So that's where I studied at the Columbia University Journalism School.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
You know the fact that you have approached your life
and your life calling through family, heritage, cultural anthropology and
writing all connected through food. You know, it's interesting your
life could be a movie. There are a lot of
movies that have been filmed in Sicily, and what you
said that kind of was interesting to me is growing up,
(08:20):
the image of Sicily was not always positive. You know,
The Godfather wonderful movie, but you know it's about the mafia,
and you know, Sicily was portrayed as poor, corrupt, beautiful,
but there were problems and unfortunately it also translated to
other aspects of business there. Obviously, the mafia, as I
(08:41):
learned because we went to the No Mafia Museum in Palermo,
did have an ironclad control over Sicily until finally it
was driven out it's sadly somewhere else, but and a
lot of I also learned they have these wineries that
were recaptured and reclassified that were formerly owned by the money.
There was a huge amount of change that happened Sicily
(09:04):
during this time, and during your research also underwent a
bit of a revolution in terms of coming to Reckoning
with itself as a place to visit and its industry
in the wine industry for sure, in the tourism and others.
A lot of things changed to help change that image.
And thankfully more and positive things are being shown and
(09:26):
written about Sicily, and the movies are great, and everybody's
saying in Indiana Jones And as you did your reason,
what did you learn that changed about Sicily? What stay
the same, but also what changed for the good?
Speaker 4 (09:36):
Well, I remember we could just go back a little
bit to when I had the second restaurant. I opened
up the restaurant saying it's a Sicilian restaurant with classic
Sicilian dishes and the wineless that was only exclusively Sicilian.
And now we're talking about twenty ten, twenty eleven, and
at the time I would say about half of the
people that came would get up from the table, go
(09:59):
to the near liquor store and purchase a bottle of
Chianti or Brunello or a wine that was non Sicilian
and come back to pay the corkage fee because they
were so uninterested in what I mean. It was amazing,
and I was very discouraged initially because I said, I
want to only represent Sicily and here people don't even
(10:23):
want to try the Sicilian wines. Then after the first
few years, there was this major shift because all of
a sudden, Sicilian wines became the wines to try. The
media was full of talking about Sicilian wines, especially with
giving a focus to Edna, and all of a sudden
things changed and people would come and search out the
(10:44):
restaurant just because I had the Sicilian wine list. And
I found that very interesting because it really is something
that reflects also the tourism of today. It's the re
creating of what Sicily is. And like you said, there's
the show that the White the White Lotus that's contributed
to a lot of tourism. It's the way that it's
(11:05):
now being represented, and it's completely different than the what
I had studied and what I had put together from
the past decade of of what houses to house, Sicily
was represented. So I think that today there's such a
major fluctuation of tourism to the islands and everyone wanting
to come here. However, it's the coastal areas that get
(11:28):
the tourism. Where we live is in the center of
the island, where our farm is, where in the mountains
of the center of Sicily, and it's absolutely an area
where tourists don't come, but you do see people come
that want to explore, that want to really get to
know what the old Sicily was and is today.
Speaker 3 (11:49):
Well, I've actually spent more time in the center of
Sicily than in the coasts because I'm blessed to go
on wine trips that have taken me there. You met
your husband, you were buying his wine, right.
Speaker 4 (12:01):
What happened was I was researching for my book and
I wanted to visit wineries in different areas. For example,
I didn't know that Sicily has nine provinces. I knew
my area of Sicily. I had, of course done so
much research, but I really needed to get to know
first hand all the different areas in order to be
able to represent it in a book form. Because Rizzoli
(12:23):
said to me, can you write an encyclopedia about Sicilian cuisine,
to which I answered no, because an encyclopedia would take
one hundred volumes and multiple lifetimes. But I can write
a good summary of what it is. But in order
to do that, I realized that I needed to really travel,
and with the restaurants, it wasn't easy, but every two
(12:43):
months I would leave and come to Sicily for ten
days and do very intense research trips. So if I
would go to an area that I didn't know where
the best honeymaker was or where the cheese was made,
I would stop first at the different wineries. So I
visited so many wineries, of which I had the wines
at my restaurant with failed in Montoni. I was introduced
(13:05):
to the wines. The first time I tried the Rucara
and Nero Davola was through master of wine Bill Nesto
and his wife Francis di Savino, who wrote the World
of Sicilian Wine, And as they were releasing the book,
they came to eat at my restaurant and brought me
a bottle, and they were enjoying a bottle of the
wine at their table and had me taste it with them,
(13:27):
and I remember feeling that it was so different, this freshness.
It didn't feel like a Sicilian wine. So I was
very struck by it, and I had to come to Montoni.
I knew that sooner or later that was part of
my agenda for my research for the book. And my husband,
of course at the time, wasn't my husband. He kept
saying no, because when the importer at the time would
(13:49):
say there's someone writing a book, he would say, well,
I don't you know, I really don't have time because
he's very hands on on the farm in the vineyards.
And for about two years that meeting never happened, and
I didn't know he was saying no. I didn't even
know he was the didn't know he was here. I
just knew it was failed to Montoni that I was visiting.
And that day, of course changed my life because my
(14:13):
first moment of meeting him was also my first moment
of meeting failed to Montoni and meeting the land of
failed to Montoni, where I felt that I just couldn't
leave and I fell in love with him, which took
time of the two of us getting to know each other.
It was love at first sight that it was getting
to know each other over a long period of time,
(14:33):
especially from a distance, but Montoni was That feeling of
seeing Montoni could never never leave my heart. And I
remember one day he said to me, after about a
year and a half of us knowing each other through
telephone calls and through multiple visits for the book, he
said to me, if you really want to visit for
the harvest? Because I expressed a desire to come to
(14:55):
visit for the harvest, He said, the only way to
understand what that even means is to spend three hundred
and sixty five days a year and to live every
day on the farm and to understand the culmination which
is this harvest. And of course it was a love
proposal on his end, but it was so true because
(15:16):
every day counts into what goes into the great harvest,
the wines being made, and to this sale of the
wines that we craft here. So I'm glad I took
him up on his offer.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
And how long ago was that, Melissa.
Speaker 4 (15:31):
It was about a decade ago, nearly close to a
decade ago at this point now.
Speaker 3 (15:36):
And the pun Tooni is like one of the most
ancient wineries in Sicily. You're talking about quite old, dating
to fourteen sixty nine, so we're in it. And the
property is an estate, a beautiful estate that you've lovingly
kept renovated or it's an ongoing love of renovation, as
we saw them move there. How did Babia's found they
(16:00):
come to own Fyoda Montani.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
Well, like you said, the wideries founded in fourteen sixty nine,
and it was founded by a noble family. At the time,
Sicily was under Aragonese rule. It passed hands many times,
always within the aristocratic realm, and the owner prior to
Fabio's grandfather was a baron who was the Cardinal of Catania.
(16:30):
He also owned lands on Edna and around around Syracuse,
Syracusa Syracuse, and he sold the property to my husband's
grandfather in the late eighteen hundreds. Basically at the time,
this was right after unification of Italy, and there was
(16:50):
a major decadence and fall of the aristocratic class and
the rise of the bourgeois class of the working class
of of of Sicily. So it was possible at that
time for and what happened often was large faiotos, which
(17:13):
are failed me comes from the word feudalism. So basically
of the basically where large expanses of land we were
under control, under the control of one owner, he became
he became the owner of the land and basically then
he passed that into the hands of my father in law.
(17:36):
And then now the third generation is is Godvil.
Speaker 3 (17:40):
And this is uh. The wines are extraordinary, and I'm
going to underscore that. You do not tasted a lot
of Sicilian wines, and universally everybody goes wow because there
is such a sense of place. And when you're sipping
the wines of Foto Montoni, you're sipping a sense of place.
But that also goes to everything there. Because we had
lunch with you as the food was you did this
(18:03):
amazing Sicilian lunch. I'm still thinking about it because I'm
craving the foods of Sicily right now on wines, which
once I said before we started going on air, we're
kind of in a food desert here when it comes
to certain types of food where we're living temporarily right now.
What percentage of your working farm is dedicated to your vineyards,
(18:23):
but also what else do you cultivate? Because you are
a full working farm and it is all hands on.
Speaker 4 (18:28):
It's all very hands on here on the farm. A
third of the land is dedicated to the vineyard, so
you can imagine it like the vineyard in the center,
and then it's surrounded by a ring that is grain
fields that we rotate with lagoon fields like lentils and
like chickpeas. All the grains we only grow heritage grains.
(18:52):
I should also say that we're very rigorously an organic farm,
so that is very influential on our decisions of what
we grow, how and how we grow them. So hence
the heritage grange, which which do very well in organic.
We also cultivate tomatoes and with the grain we make pasta.
(19:12):
We also have olive groves. So I could go on
and on. There's many different realities here on the farm,
but yet everything is run by Fabio and I with
a lot of love and a lot of time and
all of our energy put into it.
Speaker 3 (19:29):
How do you dividing up your recession's abilities because you're
also you also are parents to two young children.
Speaker 4 (19:34):
Yes, we're parents to Ellio and Francesco, who are three
years old and one year old respectively. Through not even
three Elio and they just thrive on the farm. You
can imagine we have a beach home and we could
be at the beach every day. And of course Fabio
(19:54):
and I want to be on Fabio and I want
to be on the farm, and we want to check
the vindear to day and check the fields and be
a part of it actively. And we don't want to
we don't want to manage it from afar. That's not
what we what we intend to do. But you could
see even in Elio, who is so young, but he
loves it. He doesn't care about being at the beach.
(20:15):
He wants to be in the land and on the
farm and with his little hoe in the vineyard. Or
today he helped us, be helped in what he could do,
but he helped us with loading a container of wine
that was leaving for New York. And it's just beautiful
to see his being so active and excited about being
(20:38):
part of the farm.
Speaker 3 (20:42):
Well, I want to touch on the wine and the food.
I'm going to start with the wine because I actually
your wines are widely available in the United States and
we taste it through many and you have I mean,
what's interesting is there are vines that are pre phyloccera.
I mean, you know, very old vine wines. For someone
who listeners who may be somewhat familiar with Sicilia wines,
(21:08):
let's talk about a few of the wines. Most, because
Wilson Daniels is your importer and I'm on the site,
are available here. But let's talk about some given your
location in Sicily. But some of the wines are that
set you feel set feud to Montonia part Obviously, I
(21:29):
reference the prefiloza vine, the Vercora Brucaro, which is.
Speaker 4 (21:32):
One sure, so the Prefiloxa vines are. It's very interesting
because these are vines that were on the property when
my when Fabio's grandfather purchased the land in the end
of the eighteen hundreds, so they are very old vines
that still produce and actually produce a fair amount of grapes.
(21:56):
There Netto Davola grapes and we have some pre Philoxa vines.
Of all of the different types of grapes that we
grow on the property, the only one that we have
an abundance of or two hectores of that we can
bottle is the Neto davola.
Speaker 5 (22:14):
But there's also cateralto and in Zolia and Petticne and
Nello Mascales interestingly enoughales because.
Speaker 4 (22:27):
Of course it's it's associated with Etna. Correct, But those
vines were brought here when the Cardinal of Catania who
owned the lands, the prior owner, when he owned the
lands on Itna, he had an agronomist who worked for him,
and the agronomist was also a priest father Nellia, which
interestingly means fog in Italian. He would go back and
(22:51):
forth with vines from here, which the nea is known
as calabrese, and he would bring those Calabrese vines to
the Edna and then Siracus area, and he brought ned
alo mascales here. Interesting, and today we produce wines that
are from vines that were grafted off the Prefiloxada, the
(23:12):
Prefiloxa nedal mascales and vines. It's very unusual and it
has a different expression here than it doesn't, but it
has maybe a little less austere, a little more floral notes.
You can feel it's ned aalo mascales. You can see
it in the color and in the and in the
the body and the style of the wine. But it's
(23:34):
but definitely has some notes that that distinguish it from
being a ned Ala Mascaleese from Edna. And we we
finally started bottling that that wine because my husband was
a little bit he wasn't so sure about doing so.
He didn't want to be in competition with with Thattna.
But it was the wine that his father always unified
(23:56):
and loved to drink. He said, my father in law
would say, I love it because it's a wine that
doesn't stain the glass. And now fifty years later, we're
making that wine that doesn't stain the glass. And we
called it Terre di Elio, which means the lands of Elio,
which was my father in law's name, but it's also
our first son's name. And the first vintage we've unified
(24:19):
that we commercialized, I should say, because every year we
always made a little of it, but the first vintage
that we made enough of to bottle and commercialize was
the twenty twenty when Elio was born.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
Well, I remember sitting outside. We started our day just
to paint a picture, sitting out on your patio till
it started to rain, and I remember having the Nairello
moscal ezi rose d'adell sicilian. We had that beautiful rose,
and we tasted some whites before we went inside, and
(24:52):
it is like a farmhouse inside, and you prepared this
incredible meal, and when we were there, it was I
think May spring and spring season. Yes, for those who are,
you know, less familiar with some of the and as
you said, a long time ago, no one seemed to
know the foods of Sicily. We are now talking in
(25:15):
it's early it's August September area, and harvest is starting,
and eggplant season is upon us and tomatoes are being
made into pulp.
Speaker 4 (25:25):
What are some.
Speaker 3 (25:27):
Dishes, foods and dishes that you feel are essential to
Sicily that everyone should think about whether they're visiting or
are featured in your book, because the book really takes
you through Sicily, but from where you are, well, I.
Speaker 4 (25:43):
Think that in terms of what is traditional, it's a
complicated question because when we look at the island, there's
so many different realities. We're here in the center where
a mountainous air where nearly eight hundred meters above sea level,
(26:05):
and everything that I grow here in my vegetable garden,
and everything just comes out so fresh and so flavorful
because we have these we do have the hot Sicilian sun,
but we also have the nights that are very cool,
so it's very ideal for growing all year round for
the for the vegetable garden. And what I feel is
(26:29):
that in other areas it's different. For example, in the
southeastern coast, I look more at the tomatoes and things
that are more intensely, very concentrated in flavor. In this area,
I like the the things that are more green, for example.
Also the wild vegetables and the wild herbs are very interesting,
(26:50):
which grow all throughout Sicily, but here in this mountainous
area it's quite abundant. So my cuisine very much reflects
this center area of Sicily, not only in terms of
the vegetables and the produce that's available, but this is
an area that's very rich and full of full of
(27:13):
animals for cheesemaking, because it's one of the only vineyards.
Only the closest vineyard is Regalliali, which is about twenty
eight to thirty kilometers distance from us. But in this
area it's mainly grain field. This was the classic grainary
of the Roman Empire center of Sicily, and so we're
(27:36):
full of sheep and goats and also cows and the
cheesemaking is just amazing. So when I look at ingredients
to cook with, I have this fresh produce, like you said,
egg plants right now, or the Sicilian zucchini, the long
zucchini squash, the leaves of the zucchini plant called tendumi.
(28:00):
Basically whatever is is fresh and growing. But also I
like to use the elements, the traditional elements from the
the animals of the of the territory produced. And the
recipes I've now pretty much followed very much old recipes
that are dying out and recipes that are hard to
(28:21):
hard to even replicate anymore. And those are the ones
that I love to I love to make it home.
But they're all driven by simple ingredients. We grow the chickpeas,
lentils every year. We've now we're now harvesting fair amount.
Just last week we harvested and it was quite abundant.
And it's interesting because every year they taste different. There's
(28:44):
really a vintage of the taste of the beans. And
if you taste one next to each other, you'd understand
what I mean. Because every year the climate is different,
the land is different, and that's reflected in the taste
of the foods. So what is Sicilian cuisine. We would
be talking for hours about the history of Sicily, about
(29:06):
the culture of each different area, the geography of the
different area, and then of the different social classes, because
there's so much mix within Sicily, from the peasant cuisine
to the aristocratic cuisine. And how interestingly enough, the peasant
cuisine very much often reflects dishes that come from the
(29:27):
aristocratic cuisine. For example, there's a dish that's called sard
a becafico, which basically means sardines cooked in the way
of the little birds that are called becafico. The aristocratic
recipe was that they were little birds. They were not sardines.
There were little birds that were stuffed and stuffed with
(29:50):
bread crumbs and pine nuts and raisins and cheese and
then roasted. The peasant version was to take what was abundant.
If you put a net in the sea, especially in
the springtime, you'll be you'll fill up that net easily
with with sardines. So that abundance was then translated into
(30:11):
a copying of a dish that was part of part
of an aristocratic cuisine. And there's just so many of
those type of examples. There's another examples with caponata. Caponata
comes from the word cappone, is the name of a
fish similar to a small like a machi machi in
(30:35):
terms of the flesh, and caponata was first made with
that fish, not red with egg plants. But today it's
known if you say caponata, everyone knows that that means
egg plants, right, But that's not the origin of the dish.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
That's interesting, and it sounds like capon which is a
rooster to us.
Speaker 4 (30:56):
Yeah, but it's capone from pesche Capona, the rooster is
a different word in sic and Italian.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
It's interesting when I think of recent visits to Sicily
and also to the southern parts of Italy. I've got eggplant,
and I grew up I hated eggplant as a child,
hated it, but I actually love it after going to
Italy and specifically to Sicily and to Campana, which I
think I had some of the best eggplant dishes of
(31:26):
my life.
Speaker 4 (31:27):
Sure, sure, yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:30):
And yet a lot of people are tendated to use
eggplant cook with egg plant the United States.
Speaker 4 (31:35):
I feel that a home cook in Sicily probably knows
about this is something I've said often, but at least
you need to know a hundred ways of how to
cook with egg clant as in a Sicilian home, because
right now, I mean, as we speak, this morning I
picked I can't tell you how many egg plants, and
(31:56):
there's more tomorrow to pick, and more than the next day,
and I'll be every day. It can't be done in
the same recipe. Tonight, I'm roasting them in the oven,
very simply, just the very small I harvest them when
they're really small, cut them in half, and then cut
little inserts into them, and put pieces of garlic, pieces
(32:17):
of raw garlic, some mint, some very age cheese, very
harsh spicy age cheese, and lots of olive oil and
parsley as well along with the mint, and then just
roast them in the oven. And they're just fabulous. So
that's tonight's dinner. We'll have to see for tomorrow. I
(32:40):
was thinking of making an egg clant parmigiana, which the
classic recipe here is just slicing them with skin off
in this case, slicing them, frying them, and then topping
them with some tomato sauce of course, homemade tomato sauce,
a basa leaf, and then just a sprinkle of age
(33:03):
cheese on top.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
But why would you have with that, Melissa?
Speaker 4 (33:07):
Oh, let's see with that, I'd probably have our nusa,
which is uh which comes from vines that are thirty
five year old vines that were grafted from the prefiloxide
of the mother plants. It's not a whe it's not
(33:29):
a dish to pair with the brukata because the prefiloxida,
which needs something more more hefty and more something meaty,
usually make the lamb or the roasted goat when we
have the brucata the the We also produce a wine
(33:52):
called petticone, which is quite which is it's fuller and
more spicy, and that that I usually pair when I
when I make our homemade sausage, which I make nice
full of pepper and full of black pepper and wild fennel.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
When you cook, do you think about obviously you cook
for the season. Do you think about the wine or
do you know when you think about the wine when
you're cooking? Or does that I think we do. I'll
give you an example. We had a roustane. We had
a roussan and the refrigerator last night and I just
all I could do was think about that wine, and
there was nothing in the refrigerator to eat that would
satisfy what I wanted with that wine. I ended up
(34:29):
going out and picking up because we kind of live
in a food does it right now? I end up
picking up this wonderful ty curry and spicy papaya salad
because that's all I wanted with that wine. And so
often when we cook, I think about what the wine
is first versus what we have, although sometimes it's just
what we happen to have in the refrigerator, and how
can we make it more creative and less every day?
Because I think that's a challenge for a lot of people's,
(34:51):
like you know, you have an abundance of eggplant, or
abundance of beans, or abundance of zucchini. How to make
it different every day? But when we cook, we think
about the wine just because we're wine.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
No, absolutely, absolutely we do too. But I think that
I think of it as almost like an ingredient in
the dish. So I'm cooking and then thinking pairing to
me is just basically adding another ingredient into the dish,
if that makes sense, And so probably I think about,
(35:22):
you know, what I'm cooking first, and then the wine
comes from there. We also, of course we drink our
We drink our own wines a lot also because we
always do different tastings and we have bottles open, so
we're always tasting our wines. But we also really love
to taste wines from around the world, so it's become
(35:43):
a bit of a hobby of ours and and whatt
You's that also, oh gosh, so much. I mean, we're Barolo,
we love and the Burgundy. It's everything is intriguing. German whites,
(36:04):
Austrian whites. We basically have a little bit of everything
in our little wine cellar. And when we have a
dish that's interesting, we figure out what to open and
what to pair with it. But there's a fun fine,
that's for sure.
Speaker 3 (36:21):
Well yeah, because listen, dinner doesn't taste good with water.
Let's be real. I understand you have a vineyard project.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
So the vineyard at the moment is forty four hectors,
and we just this year just planted the wild vines
for another eight hectors of vineyard. I think you might
have when yeah, when you came in May, you saw
the baby vines.
Speaker 3 (36:45):
Twenty four hectors is fairly large just for everybody who
doesn't know. Now, that's about one hundred and eight acres.
Speaker 4 (36:51):
It's fairly large. I mean taking into consideration that we're
a family winery because we're basically a meat small small
to medium sized winery, but still completely family operated. And
it's we have the requests for the wines, and we
(37:15):
realized that we needed to we needed to expand just
a little bit. So this year we added the eight hectors.
What we do here is that first we plant wild vines.
So in January we planted those wild vines. Wild vines
do not produce grapes. So next week, not even this
(37:36):
is Saturday, it's when two days from now, a group
of grafters and the average age is seventy eight years old.
Of the group of grafters who come, there's five of them.
And it's very hard to find grafters nowadays because it's
absolutely a dying art. Because if you, for the most part,
(37:57):
when someone wants to plant a new vineyard, you go
to the nursery garden, or you take the catalog from
a nursery garden and you pick out which, let's say,
clone of Netodaba you'd like, you read the description, you'd
like it to be more disease resistant, or one that
works better at a high altitude, or one that has
more taste of cherry, or so forth. Here Montoni, the
(38:20):
objective is to look at the past in order to
make decisions for the future. That's my husband's motto and
that's become mine as well. And what we very consciously
decided was if we plant a new vineyard, and when
we do so, it has to be planted grafted from
the old plants. That means that we continue the genetic
(38:43):
code of the old plants, which is a genetic code
that's unique to Montoni. Especially. There's there's been research done
on neo davola which is quite interesting. There were thirty
different specimens of neo davola from around Sicily to and
within that thirty fifteen different clones were identified. And that
(39:07):
was only thirty taken, so you can imagine if that
was expanded. So fifty percent is very very high percentage.
And the clone that's here at Montoni is of the
nettle dabola or of the nettle mascalase or so forth,
is what we want to carry forward genetically. So the
(39:27):
only way to do so, of course, is to not
purchase vines from the nursery garden and two graft onto
the to the wild vines. So it's an amazing scene.
I'll send you pictures, Melanie from the over the next
few days, because the whole work job needs to be
done within a ten to ten day window. Well, the
(39:50):
grafters will come, they'll take the pieces of the of
the old vines. And what's interesting is we're grafting a
part of the vineyard at the highest point. We're grafting
from old vines that we are researching right now. We
don't even know the name of the old vines. There's
(40:11):
some red and some white vines that we are not
sure even what they are, the very old to uh
to the land, and we're grafting from them a part
of the of the vineyard.
Speaker 3 (40:25):
Well, you know, Melissa, I'm on your website Feyoda Montoni
I T and you have a wonderful video explanation of this.
I love it because it says, basically as you said,
you can set up a vineyard with two roads to follow.
You buy the plants from the nursery or you propagate
the ancient vines from your vineyards. And that is like
for someone who's not in the wine business doesn't understand that.
(40:48):
It's like if you had the mother of a very
fine balsamic vinegar, when to make a really fine balsamic vinegar,
you'd have to start with the mother and you have
to propagate. And that's really what you're doing, is you're
propagating and keep and that is something very unique to
Fayouda Montoni. I want to underscore that like fifty times
because it is it is labor intensive. I'm kind of
(41:10):
blown away that that they're seventy eight years old and
what happens when they die out. But basically you're taking,
as you said, the genetic code and that takes time.
So when you're doing that, now, when will you actually
see vines producing fruit?
Speaker 4 (41:26):
Well, by next year? What comes up is the is
what's been grafted on, So in terms of variety, would
be already the plant by next year will that grows
will be the variety that we that we uh graft
onto the wild plant. By the time we see fruit
(41:46):
could be let's say the second year that it's planted.
But we cut off those those clusters, So we'll cut
them off in order to strengthen the roots of those vines.
We'll do that for a few years. So the first
sign of of of grapes that we could could look
at will be about five years down the road. But
(42:08):
it's it's really for a long term project. It's a
it's a vineyard that we planted so so that our
sons can have can can can harvest the fruits as
they grow up. Because it's really, uh, it's a project
that we look at. It's a four year project. It's
not it's not something that you look at for so
(42:31):
next year we're already already making wine.
Speaker 3 (42:35):
Well, I think it's important. This is this is a
labor of love. This is you know, looking at the
genetics of wine. And it is not like the wine
that are most people in the United States are seeing
on shelves supermarkets, which is you know, like the equivalent
of fast food wine half the time. This is wine
that is you know, they're slow cooking. This is slow
(42:57):
cultivation and evolution of of of of vine and it's
quite fascinating and like a lot of people don't understand that, but.
Speaker 4 (43:06):
This is how we do everything on the farm. It's
I know, of course you focus focus on the wine,
but that's the heritage grains. We save our grain year
to year. That's that's a strain of grain that it
is not found everywhere, and it's not a regular modern
version genetically modified Durham wheat. The tomatoes that the tomato
(43:30):
plants I have, the seeds that are from very old
old versions. Even the vinegar that I make that I
use in my kaponata has a mother mother vinegar that
came from my husband's great aunts, a great uncle's mother,
so it goes back over a century ago. That to
(43:53):
us is the basis of everything, and it's I don't
know if the excitement comes through in my voice, but
I how I could express that. It's just the driving
force between what we do, and it's what I could
only have dreamed of doing as a child, going back
to when I was twelve years old, cooking in our
(44:13):
home to fill the fill the home with the scent
of sicily. Today I'm able to do that, and today
I'm able to realize the realize those dreams. And it's
just a true blessing.
Speaker 3 (44:28):
You really are living the room. And David and I
were blessed because your son us once an incredible care
package with the most amazing pasta and chick We still
have some of those chickwas we actually, you know, we
fight over wind to use them because we keep we
want to hold on everything and honeys and the bront
these pistache Scilian pistachios and honey and everything. It's just amazing.
(44:48):
Can you do you? Can you do? You sell your products?
Is there a way for anyone in the United States
to get your food products? And you can get the wines,
but what about the food?
Speaker 4 (44:56):
Well, what we've done now is we've we've sold on
very smaller scale and to some of our partners around
the world that have organic shops or really focus on
the organic, especially with our olive oil or the lentils.
But we have made the decision to also package and
(45:17):
sell on the more small scale some of our some
of these products like the pastas, the tomato sauces. It's
just that it's we don't want it to take away
from our focus on the wine because it's in order
to make wine that to make good wine, it really
takes our dedication and being a family, family operated business.
(45:40):
It's those three hundred and sixty five days a year
and are not going to the beaches and are not
taking vacations, and it's this. It's full time dedicated to
that and to tasting all the tanks every ten days,
and to being a part of the seller operations day
(46:01):
to day. So our other products are where I have
a huge passion for them and I put I put
energy into them. But of course we don't want them
to to take away from our main focus, which which
is it's the wines, and that's why I do small scale.
So this year, in terms of tomatoes, I have one
(46:24):
hector of tomatoes planted. The lentils which are easier to
cultivate and easier to easier to manage on a large scale.
We we seeded the ten hectors more or less this year.
But everything has to be proportioned in order to keep
wind our focus.
Speaker 3 (46:45):
You know, I'm going to underscores we start to wind
down this wonderful conversation. This is a very special place
in the heart and soul and center of Italy, which I,
David and I are blessed to have visited. Blessed for
those of you who do decide to come to Italy,
whether you visit Fayota, Montoni or not, you can get
(47:06):
the wines in Italy and in the United States. But
when you travel. Wherever you travel, go off the beaten
track to the heart and soul of a region. Don't
just stay where all the tourists are on the coasts
or in the big city exactly, you won't meet the
real You'll see the soul, but you won't see the heart,
and that, I think is what it's special about Fayota Montoni.
(47:27):
There's a soul throughout Sicily, but you're in the heart.
It's a beating heart of what's happening and a living,
working farm and family. And I feel that's what I
felt when I was there.
Speaker 4 (47:38):
Well, your words are very beautiful and very touching to
me because it's exactly what I feel. But I'm not
always sure if everyone else feels the same. But the
fact that you felt that way when you came to
Feldo Montoni confirms how I feel about living here and
about dedicating my life to this land. And it's it's
(48:00):
also a life that's dedicated not only to this land,
but to this beating heart of Sicily that really needs
attention and really needs to be not forgotten, because if
anything about about the work we do, it's about bringing
life to the territory and not letting it be abandoned
(48:21):
because it could easily be so, but that's not That's
obviously not what our objective is. And I hope that
in my next book, which is basically it's basically all
of my field work. We could call it, but a
collection of my diaries from the past years, I hope
that I can best represent what this beating heart of
(48:43):
the of the core of Sicily means, and not only
what it means to me, but how it's a reflection
an example for the rest of the world in today's
modern world.
Speaker 3 (48:54):
Well, you're a beautiful writer. Again, I just want to
underscore that the book that is available right now is Sicily.
It's by Rissouli, The Cookbook, and it is fabulous. I
can't wait to read your next one. I love the
fact that you followed your heart to the place you
want to be, because that is what I'm all about,
is helping people follow their heart and live the life
(49:15):
they choose. And I love the fact that you've done that.
Thank you so much for joining me. I'm getting hungry
just thinking about everything. I can't wait to see you again,
see you and Fabia and the family again. Until then,
I toast to everything you're doing.
Speaker 4 (49:29):
Thank you, Melanie, and thank you for having me and
I warmly warmly welcome you and David back as soon
as possible. This is your retreat and wherever whenever you
want to come stay for an extended period of time,
You're more than welcome to do so.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
Thank you, I appreciate it. And good luck with harvest
this year, all right.
Speaker 4 (49:51):
Thank you, thank you. I'll keep you posted definitely with
some photographs as we graft and as we harvest.
Speaker 3 (49:56):
All right, thank you very much.
Speaker 4 (49:58):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (50:01):
Stranded in the part of
Speaker 3 (50:13):
PA
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com