For a true history of Nero d'Avola

Author: Joe Castellano
Language: Italian
Format: Soft cover 16.5x24 cm
240 pages
ISBN 9788831403566

Revisiting the History of a People and a Land through a vine that did not come from Avola .
The territorial uniqueness of sulfur, a perfect combination for millennia in fighting vine parasites. At the same time, however, after about 1800, for almost two hundred years and for a sort of historical nemesis, the unfortunate desire to aspire to the fabulous riches of the mines. Even with incorrect definitions, from the ashes of the Calabrese today Sicily can reconstruct for the first time, I think, the plausible history of a vine like its synonym called Nero d'Avola.

“In historia sulphuris, magnae opes et magna populi inopia. In parva terrafatto mors sulphuris vini renascentia substituta est...”
(In the history of sulfur, the great wealth and the great poverty of the people. Only in a small land, the death of sulfur was replaced by the rebirth of wine .)

Joe Castellano

The author
Angelo – aka Joe – Castellano, is an artist from Agrigento, famous throughout the world for his great Soul and Blues Band and for his other creation, which since 2003, the “Blues & Wine Soul Festival”.
For 44 years Musician/Pianist, Composer, Band Leader and Artistic Director of various festivals, today Joe himself . is also a careful scholar of wine and ampelography, as well as organizer for 20 years, within his own Blues & Wine Soul Festival, of an important annual "Conference of Ampelography and study of the Italian vineyard", in which great Italian and international scholars always participate. All this, today has led him to also be a writer of the wine subject and a great popularizer of what emerges from the studies developed by him. Also thanks to him, for example, and other famous scholars, in 2022 it was possible to give a final truth on the real paternity of an important vine such as the "Grillo".
For years, also among the "Ambassadors of Italian toast in the World" as elected by the magazine "Bubble's Magazine Italia", he has had as his "Godfather" in food and wine and in the events connected to it, his great friend and legendary Journalist/Writer, Luigi Veronelli.

If his fame as a musician and composer of international importance, has led him to publish six albums to date, reviewed by the best Radios and Magazines around the world, much appreciated, has also been his activity as a composer of soundtracks for films, which have seen actors such as Maria Grazia Cucinotta, Leo Gullotta, Tony Sperandeo and many others in the field ...
The only artist cited in 2015 in Memphis, during the funeral ceremony of the King of Blues, Mr. BB King, in front of 800,000 people and with 88 televisions connected from all over the world, Joe Castellano combined the passions that had characterized his life since he was a child: Music and the love for the countryside and for Wine in particular. The author, in fact, remained very attached to the years that from his childhood to his youth, saw him grow up in the beloved “Noce” district of Racalmuto (Agrigento), which has always been the land of the best Nero d'Avola and where he himself produced, with dear friends of that Contrada, a highly appreciated Rosso. Among the friends he met every day in the summer and who combined their grapes with those of Castellano and Rizzo, there was another great figure of world culture, the writer Leonardo Sciascia. The “Regalpetra” label (taken from one of Sciascia's novels) intended for a wine created only for the Amici della Noce, was born from this great partnership.
Studies on the History of the Vine and the related ampelographic reflections have led Joe Castellano to be one of the most active Italian scholars of this subject and the author of important new theses, now carefully evaluated by the scientific world.