A Sicilian Love Story of Food and Wine

It was the kind of marriage you read about in the Sunday style section of the New York Times.

Melissa Muller was chef/owner of Bar Eolo and Pastai, two restaurants in New York. Her grandmother, Francesca, left her village in western Sicilian – Sant’ Anna – in 1936 for a new life in America, and Melissa loved visiting her birthplace. Nearby, Fabio Sireci was a young winemaker at the family-owned Feudo Montoni winery, located in the rolling hills southeast of Palermo in Sicily’s west end.  

I first met the two by proxy a few years ago when Fabio’s American wine importer thought the two might make a good wine story and said he would arrange to send me a bottle or two of Montoni wine. What I received instead was a huge box from Sicily containing two bottles of Montoni wines, a copy of Melissa’s cookbook – Sicily the Cookbook (Rizzoli, 2017), the winery’s olive oil, and several containers of locally grown and made pasta, native spices, honey, marmalades, vegetables and a big spray of dried oregano.

Each holiday since, I have received a similar, if smaller, sampling of Sicilian goodies. Melissa, it turns out, is perhaps Sicily’s best ambassador for its home-grown foodstuffs.

“Fabio and I first met – at Feudo Montoni – years back when I was researching for my book, Sicily,” Melissa later told me. “I carried Fabio’s wines at my New York restaurants, and I requested a tour of Montoni through his former New York distributor. Fabio and I met on several occasions after our first meeting, but always for work-related matters – photographs for my book, a TV documentary on Sicily. For our official first ‘date,’ Fabio took me on a tour around Palermo, and, since it was a hot summer day, we stopped to eat lemon granita at a famous kiosk at the port of Palermo.”

During her research, Melissa began planning a permanent “return” to her grandmother’s homeland. “It wasn’t difficult to change continents at all because my soul was already rooted in Sicily,” Melissa says.  “I spent all of my childhood summers in Sicily and always felt more at home here, perhaps because of the abundance of relatives in my grandmother’s village. While living in the U.S., all of my studies and professional work had been dedicated to Sicily.”

Meanwhile, Fabio had taken over as the third generation of the family that has owned the Feudo Montoni estate since the late 1800s. Today, the certified organic winery produces many of Italy’s most celebrated 100% indigenous varietals – Perricone, Nerello Mascalese, Catarratto, Grillo and Inzolia– in addition to the purest expression of Nero d’Avola.

It is the most-recent vintage of the Montoni Nero d’Avola that I again received this year from Melissa and Fabio – and, again, full magnum of it along with a generous sampling of Sicilian produce.

It has been 10 years since Melissa sold her restaurants, moved to Sicily and began to work in the winery with Fabio. And now the couple has two sons – perhaps the fourth generation that will run the Montoni wine – and food – business.