On Tuesday night, Donnafugata brought Sicily to downtown Manhattan with ‘A Taste of Sicily’s Volcanic Soul,’ an intimate dinner at Tucci in SoHo led by co-CEO José Rallo. The evening featured two volcanic territories in Sicily: the slopes of Etna and the island of Pantelleria including Bollicina Gold 2020, Sul Vulcano Bianco 2022, Lighea 2025, Sul Vulcano Rosso 2022, Cuordilava 2020, and Ben Ryé 2023.
Held in a private downstairs room tucked away from the main dining floor, the evening gathered wine enthusiasts and sommeliers around a family-style meal and conversation about the ways wine can hold memory, travel, and family all at once. Guests were encouraged to think of the room as José’s table for the night, a place where wine was there to help people talk. The wines moved in and out of the meal, but so did stories about the everyday exchanges that José described as central to the way her family has always lived with wine.
José spoke about Donnafugata as a company founded by her parents in 1983, but placed it within a much longer family history, noting that her family had been in the wine business since 1851. Her father was the fourth generation when he decided to begin something new with her mother, with a different idea of quality and a more modern point of view. Family business, José said, means passion, but it also means long-term vision.
Photo Courtesy: Donnafugata
In a family involved in wine, she said, that also means talking about rain in June, whether a vineyard got what it needed, and how different parts of the business meet around the same table. Her brother oversees the productive cycle, while others in the family handle communication, sales, or winemaking. Those perspectives are exchanged constantly, and wine was not just the product of the family business. It was one of the ways the family stays connected.
Lighea, the dry Zibibbo from Pantelleria, was one of the most memorable bottles of the night. While people often read its orange blossom and citrus profile as sweetness, the wine is dry. In the glass, it was aromatic and floral enough to suggest sweetness at first, but then brighter and more mineral once it settled. It was the wine that seemed to surprise the table most, and one of the most enjoyable to return to over the course of the dinner.
Photo Courtesy: Donnafugata
The meal itself was served family-style. The menu included calamari fritti with lemon aioli, heirloom radicchio salad with honeycomb, candied walnuts, and goat cheese, tuna carpaccio with fennel and capers, spaghetti pomodoro, meatballs, veal chop marsala with wild mushrooms and rosemary jus, and broccoli rabe. Of the dishes, the pasta was the standout, and the one that most clearly brought the table to Sicily.
Later in the evening, Ben Ryé 2023 emerged as another favorite. Rich, sweet, and made from Zibibbo grown on Pantelleria, it was the clearest dessert-wine moment of the dinner and one of the strongest pours of the night. Served alongside cheesecake, it felt generous and properly indulgent. Ben Ryé was sweet, concentrated, and decadent.
José spoke about Sicily in a way that made the evening feel more grand than a standard regional tasting. Though she described it as a very small island in the middle of the Mediterranean, her family always looked at Sicily as a place from which to reach outward to other cultures and other ways of living. Buyers and visitors from around the world were already part of family life when her children were small, sitting at the table even when they couldn’t yet understand the language being spoken around them. Education was not just about learning the family business, but about learning how to be citizens of the world. A Taste of Sicily’s Volcanic Soul originated in Etna and Pantelleria, but its larger point was about gathering and how wine carries connection from one person to another through the glass.
