Le Eolie nel mondo (dicono di noi)

The Australian THE GLOBAL GOURMET ENJOY the sweet life of an Aeolian isle. IT is an innocent enough question, I decide. For days I have been indulging in a delectable sweet white wine called Malvasia delle Lipari but I am on Salina, not the neighbouring island of Lipari. "Why this mysterious appellation?" I ask winemaker Francesco Fenech. The explanation is not, shall we say, as crystal clear as the Mediterranean water from which Salina rises. "It was the mafia," he rails. "The mafia and corrupt Italian politicians." I don't quite follow, but I nod meekly in feigned agreement as I have no desire to join the apparently extensive catalogue of those who have aroused the ire of Signor Fenech. I encounter the redoubtable Fenech in the town of Malfa on the north coast of Salina, one of the seven volcanic islands known as the Aeolians in the Tyrrhenian Sea north of Sicily. He is the producer of two of this island's culinary gems: that wine with the confusing name and the eponymous caperi di Salina. The rotund Fenech is as rustic as his tasting room (converted from a garage, it seems) and as jolly as his passito, or dessert wine. But last night I learned more about the production of this vinous peculiarity from a visit to the Hauner winery in the village of Lingua. Our dinner the previous evening at Porto Bello restaurant in Santa Marina Salina dissolved into the decadence of a bottle of Hauner's Riserva. "The best passito in Italy," declared our waiter, Dario, before telling us to call on his friend, Andrea Hauner. (Salina is that sort of place: everyone knows everyone else three generations back.) We go there the next morning on our rented scooter and Hauner, wearing nothing but a pair of bermuda shorts and a mop of curly brown hair, initiates us into the secrets of Malvasia delle Lipari. The Malvasia grapes are harvested in September and left to dry in the sun on traditional cannizzi (a kind of straw mat) before being pressed and blended with 5 per cent of red Corinto Nero grapes. As we talk of wine, we encounter a woman in a corner of the winery meticulously applying labels to small jars and filling them from a large zinc bath at her feet. The bath is filled with a camouflage-green mush and coarse salt crystals: Hauner's caperi di Salina. I am confused: I have always thought capers (to which I am rather partial) are the pickled seeds of the plant. But no amount of salt could reduce those large berries, some of which are the size of my thumb, on the caper plants (capparis spinosa) growing like weed all over Salina to these shrivelled, pea-sized lumps. It turns out I have laboured under a misapprehension, from which Hauner liberates me. He explains that the capers I know are in fact the young flower buds, picked before they can blossom. By a caper plant in the driveway he points out a branch with unopened buds nearest the stem, the delicate flowers that have opened in the middle, and the berries towards the end of the branch. There is no single flowering season or harvest time; flowers open continually along the stem. The flowers have white petals with light purple stamens and last for only a day under the Mediterranean sun; what is a delightful orchid in the morning will be a wilted memory by dusk. But if allowed to turn into fruit, they become edible again as cucunci or caperberries. Sliced finely when fresh, they make a pungent addition to salads. Or, if pickled, they can be an aperitivo alongside olives. They may be of least practical use, but those ephemeral flowers - here one moment, gone the next - seem the perfect metaphor for the pleasures of Salina. Island life here gently sways to a rhythm of its own, offering pleasures both intense and transient, like a jar of pickled flower buds or a glass of amber nectar that recalls the Mediterranean light, captured in the juice of shrivelled grapes.

, a cura di Peppe Paino

Data notizia: 12/16/2010