Gambino Winery

​Our plan was a bit questionable, to say the least.  It seemed like a good plan when we’d had a few bottles of wine….  Archimedes had been killed when the Romans took the city of Syracuse, on the island of Sicily.  It was an accident – the Roman soldiers were told not to kill him, but mostly likely they didn’t know what he looked like.  The idea then was to find his time device and send images of Archimedes to the Romans so they would not kill him.  Who knows what he would discover with Roman support?  Of course, we couldn’t send pictures – just images such as the one shown below:

​First problem then was to find his time device.  Our first attempt was by land, starting with the Archimedes museum.  The museum is located on the small island that sits in Syracuse bay, Ortesia.  We found the museum, but could not find any clues there or in the area near the fountain, or the ruins of the Temple of Apollo.

​We returned with our full retinue a few days later.  While some of our group continued to search Ortesia, some of us decided to look for it from the water, taking a boat around the island and into the many sea grottos around the city.  Alas, no sign of a time device.

​Having failed to help Archimedes, we naturally headed out to a winery.  It is, after all, what we do best.  Our intrepid group, now numbering twelve (thirteen if you include our driver) once again headed up the dangerous north slope of Mount Etna, along more narrow mountain roads, to the Gambino Winery.  Gambino winery has been around awhile, and it is worth noting that they are committed to ”organic farming, water conservation, and minimal intervention winemaking.”  I expected another rustic facility, with just a few other visitors.  Instead we found ourselves in a beautiful, new, and very popular winery.

​They also have a great view:

​We were a large group so we did our wine tasting (after a brief tour) in a large room set up for large groups.  Very nice room, indeed, but it had the American restaurant problem of no noise suppression.  Really hard to hear our server over the general din of conversation.
When we sat down at the table in the tasting room we were quite surprised to find boiled eggs.  Turns out that in addition to wine and olive oil, Gambino sells very special salts.  Really good salts.  Oh, and their olive oil is superb.
We tasted several wines.  The most interesting wine was their white Tifeo Bianco.  It is a blend of two white Sicilian grapes – Carricante and Catarrato.  It is a very nice wine.  The red wines we tasted were made from Nerello Mascalese, Nero D’Avola, or a blend thereof.  All were nice, but not particularly noteworthy.