A year ago, I was in a van traveling from Messina Airport toward the slopes of Etna, part of the Etna Days 2024 contingent. Along a particular stretch of road between Messina and Castiglione di Sicilia, there's a landscape that stirs the imagination — hills that were once clearly cultivated, now seemingly surrendered back to nature.
Whenever I look up at those slopes, I can’t help but feel that forgotten vineyards still cling to the earth, their roots deep and ancient. I’ve heard whispers from veteran wine folk — stories of a hidden world of grapevines that date back to the 19th century. Vines that somehow survived phylloxera, wars, economic collapse, and even the creeping reach of gentrification. In other words, the hills have gone feral.
That idea thrills me. It makes me wonder about the lives once lived up there — men and women who planted and harvested, fermented and exported, lived and died among those vines. And now? Who remembers them? Who walks those rows?
It echoes our own lives, doesn’t it? We work, we build, we save, we grow old. And then? Do we go feral, too, in our final years? Some of us might — fading quietly into the background. Others rage, as Dylan Thomas put it, “against the dying of the light.”
But those forgotten grapevines? They simply live. They take in the sun, the rain, the wind — and on Etna, the manna of La Muntagna herself.
Why am I entrenched in this meandering? Because it’s about possibility — the unknown paths, the untended corners of life where something still grows wild and true. The “what ifs.” As with the vines, so it is with people.
The vines know their place — anchored in soil, guided by seasons, content within the quiet logic of nature.
People, by contrast, are restless. We question boundaries, resist definitions, press against the edge of what is known — driven not always by need, but by the sheer weight of our own wondering.
And yet, not all choose to move.
Some remain still, not out of peace, but resignation — waiting for the final chapter to write itself, for the book to close without their hand on the pen.
In a dream, the vines reach out to me — whispering through the down of a pillow, "We are still here. We are not gone yet."
When I wake, the echo lingers. I wonder who will one day “discover” them — in some undefined future — and the wines that will be born from their survival.
On certain hills already reclaimed, vines as old as 150 years still bear fruit. Even now, they are being readied for harvest. The soil of Etna, volcanic and timeless, seems to grant a kind of immortality to those that endure.
But Etna is not alone.
In places like the Colli Euganei in the Veneto, mystery also sleeps — vines and stories lying dormant beneath the surface, waiting for a new generation to uncover them, to listen, to give them purpose once again.
These mental wanderings are more than idle thoughts — they are scaffolding for hope, fragile but essential. Not just hope for the future of wine, but for the broader, troubled landscape of our world.
They give me fuel to continue.
My own vines are old now. Some, I admit, I’ve forgotten — left untended in the corners of memory. Yet beneath a light fog, they still live. Still thrive, quietly, stubbornly.
And you?
Are you in your season of growth? Or decline?
Are you waxing toward fullness — or waning into something else entirely?
