Some awards make you happy, and some make you think. The one we received this year from Slow Wine does both.
In the Slow Wine 2027 guide, presented in Milan on Saturday 17 October at SuperstudioMaxi, Valdibella is one of the 247 Italian wineries awarded the Snail (Chiocciola), one of seventeen in Sicily. And our Respiro 2024, Nero d’Avola Sicilia DOC, received the Top Wine – Slow Wine award and the Best Buy.
What these awards mean
Slow Wine doesn’t reward only what’s in the glass. Top Wine – Slow Wine goes to wines that, beyond excellent sensory quality and good value for money, manage to capture in the glass the character of their land, history and environment. Best Buy is reserved for Top Wines with a particularly good price for their appellation or style.
The Snail, on the other hand, isn’t given to a wine but to a winery: it recognises how it interprets sensory, territorial and environmental values in harmony with Slow Food.
For a cooperative like ours, born from a group of farmers’ decision to work the land without synthetic chemicals and to do it together, it’s a recognition of the whole journey, not of a single bottle. It speaks of the members who tend the vineyards, of spontaneous fermentations, of choices that sometimes take effort but that we’d make again every time.
Respiro, a Nero d’Avola that tastes of home
Respiro is one of our CRU wines: a wine from a single vineyard, that of Irene Vaccaro in Contrada Fargione, bringing to the glass the character of that piece of land and the hand of the person who farms it.
The vineyard sits at about 250 metres above sea level, on clay-sandy soil, trained to spur-pruned cordon, with deliberately low yields. In the cellar we follow the same method as for all our wines. The grapes are destemmed but not crushed. Fermentation starts spontaneously, with a starter prepared 36 hours earlier using the grapes’ own yeasts. After 12–14 days of maceration on the skins and spontaneous malolactic fermentation, the wine ages for six to eight months in stainless steel, with no wood, to let the fruit speak.
In the glass it’s ruby red. On the nose there’s cherry and wild berries, with a balsamic note on the finish. On the palate it’s warm and soft, with fine acidity and tannins that make it easy to drink and hard to forget. Serve between 18 and 20 °C.
An award to share
An award like this doesn’t belong to one person. It belongs to the members who work the vineyards, to those who run the cellar, to those who bring our wines to shops, wine bars and tables. And it belongs to those who choose them, bottle after bottle, knowing what lies behind them.
Thank you to Slow Wine for their attention and their storytelling. We’ll keep doing what we know how to do: farming with respect and letting the wine tell the rest.
To find out where to buy Respiro and other Valdibella wines, write to us at commerciale@valdibella.com.
