The road east from Randazzo runs along the north slope of Etna at about 650 metres, through Passopisciaro and then Solicchiata, two hamlets of Castiglione di Sicilia that a stranger would take for one village. The walls on both sides are black lava stone. On the first Tuesday of November I drove it at 08:30 with the heater on, 7 °C outside, and above the vines the summit had its first snow and a thread of steam. This is the Sicily that guests on my Italy tours do not expect: a mountain, not a beach.
Frank Cornelissen’s cellar is in Solicchiata itself, a working building rather than a showpiece. He came out to meet me in boots; the last Nerello had come in the week before, and the place smelled of it.
A Belgian on the north slope since 2001#
The public story is short. Frank Cornelissen is Belgian and spent years trading wine before he made any. He arrived on Etna in 2001 with no oenology diploma, bought small parcels of old alberello vines on the north slope, and made his first vintage the same autumn. The estate has grown to about 24 hectares since: 13 of old bush vines on chestnut stakes, 9 converted to rows, 2 of olives, and fruit trees and vegetables between, because he has said in public that a vineyard should not be a monoculture.
I first met the wines in Brno, not in Sicily. A friend opened a Susucaru rosso one winter evening and I held it up to the lamp, sure the colour was a mistake. Nerello Mascalese is pale by nature; this was paler, and it smelled of blood orange and smoke. I have poured it ever since as the wine that resets a guest’s idea of a Sicilian red.
Contrade from 600 to 1,000 metres#
We drove up before we tasted, which is the right order here. His parcels are scattered across several contrade between 600 and 1,000 metres, each on its own lava flow; the highest is Barbabecchi, where the Nerello for Magma grows. The ground is ripiddu, the loose black lava gravel, and the vines are alberello: a single trunk, a chestnut stake, a bush of shoots, planted close. Many of the oldest vines on this slope are ungrafted; phylloxera never did well in volcanic sand this high.
Frank walked ahead and talked about the vines the way a man talks about old friends. He avoids treatments in principle, and in a kind year the vineyards get nothing. In the difficult years, 2004, 2005, 2013 and 2015 among them, copper and sulfur went on to save the plants, and he has said so in public. He has said publicly that even biodynamics prescribes too much for his liking; the method is revised every year, and the wines are the record of that.
“I do not want a recipe,” he said, pulling a yellow leaf off a stake. “The mountain changes every year. If I stopped changing with it, I would be making something else.”
No wood: epoxy tanks and terracotta in the rock#
The cellar is not what a Piedmont guest expects. There is no wood, none, not a barrel or a botte. The wine ferments and rests in epoxy-lined tanks of up to 2,500 litres and in terracotta vessels, epoxy-coated inside, buried to the neck in volcanic rock so that only their mouths show at floor level. In the early years the amphorae were unlined. The point, as I understand it, is a neutral container that lets the fruit and the lava flow speak, without the seasoning of oak or the breath of raw clay.
If you have stood beside the buried jars of Oslavia on my Friuli and Collio orange wine tour, you will recognise the room and notice the difference at once: a clay belly in the ground, but lined, which is Cornelissen’s own answer to a question about oxygen. Why the vessels are cousins and not twins is in my piece on qvevri, karas and amphora.
Sulfur in the cellar was zero in the first years; today the estate describes it as a decision taken wine by wine rather than a rule. I asked about it plainly, as a sommelier who pours both natural and classic wines, and the answer was plain: a stable wine that shows the place, and the means follow from that. Good classic producers give me the same answer from the other side.
One glass: MunJebel Rosso 2021#
The range has three names. Susucaru, rosso and rosato, is the door. MunJebel, Sicilian for the mountain, is the middle of the range: reds, among them the single-contrada bottlings, and a bianco. Magma, from Barbabecchi, is the grand vin. We tasted standing at a steel bench, 16 °C in the room.
The Susucaru rosato after it was almost a light red, bitter orange and a mouthful of salt. The MunJebel bianco, Carricante with Grecanico, Catarratto and Minnella from old mixed plantings, tasted of lemon skin and sea air.
Lunch in Linguaglossa#
There is no restaurant at the cellar, so we drove down to Linguaglossa, a quarter of an hour east, with two bottles. Lunch was salsiccia al ceppo, the local sausage chopped on a stump and grilled, with Etna porcini from that week’s rain, then pasta with Bronte pistachio, then pecorino and a spoon of Frank’s Magma olive oil on bread. The MunJebel with the sausage was the pairing of the day: smoke on smoke, acid against fat, and the tannin cleaned the plate. The rosato took the pistachio pasta.
Granita di mandorla, coffee, and outside the sun had come round and the summit was steaming into a blue sky. It was 13 °C, which at 550 metres in November counts as Sicilian winter.
Cornelissen on tour#
I will be as plain about this door as I am about Gravner’s. Frank Cornelissen receives the trade by appointment and does not run a tasting room, and I do not promise a visit I have not confirmed for my Etna volcanic wine tour. What I do promise is the wine: on the north-slope evening a MunJebel Rosso stands beside a single-contrada Etna Rosso from a classic steel-and-oak estate, same grape, same slope, same vintage, and the table argues for an hour. Benanti, over on the south-east side, is the other pole of that argument, and I pour it with equal respect. Every April the Contrade dell’Etna tasting puts both camps in one room, which is the right way to hold the debate.
Guests who have done my Piedmont tour understand Nerello fastest. Nebbiolo taught them pale colour with real tannin; Nerello Mascalese from a buried tank on a volcano teaches the same lesson without the wood, and with salt. I call Etna the Langhe’s southern cousin, and nobody in either place has objected yet.
I drove back to Randazzo with a bottle of Susucaru rosso on the passenger seat and the summit in the mirror. Twenty-odd years in, the man who says nobody will ever fully understand nature still goes up to look at the mountain. That is not modesty. It is the method.
