Alice Bonaccorsi

Alberello vines on lava soil

The alberello vines keep the work low to the ground. Alice Bonaccorsi, winemaker at Alice Bonaccorsi in Randazzo, farms and makes wine at Croce Monaci on the northern slopes of Mount Etna, where the bench is a vineyard of stone, ash, and old wood. Her role is not separated into grower and cellar hand. The season sets the terms, then she carries those terms inside. The contemporary estate took shape here in 2000, after she began the wine project in 1997, and the family farm behind it reaches back to 1763 in the Piedimonte Etneo area, in Contrada Val Cerasa, the valley of cherries. Bonaccorsi has described the pull of that inheritance plainly: “My father was a doctor but his family owned some farmland and he was very close to the land.” The sentence explains much of the house. It is not a decorative lineage. It is a way of deciding when to touch, when to wait, and when to let the volcanic ground keep its own language in Nerello Mascalese, Nerello Cappuccio, Carricante, Catarratto, and the other local white grapes she works.

Native grapes without chemical shortcuts

The method begins outside, with organic farming and ICEA certification, and the alberello system asks for a great deal of handwork. Bush-trained vines do not give their fruit to machinery easily. They require time on the tools, pruning close, moving vine by vine, reading vigor against stone. The vineyards sit between 700 and 900 meters above sea level, on sandy, stony soils formed from lava flow deposits, with little organic substance and a mineral charge that suits Etna’s native varieties. Some vines date back 80 years. In the field, the estate works with sulfur and copper rather than synthetic treatments, keeping spontaneous vegetation and fruit trees as part of the living pattern around the rows. In the cellar, fermentations start spontaneously, without commercial yeasts, and the family favors physical control, including temperature, over chemical correction. Production stays small, about 25,000 to 30,000 bottles per year, across Etna DOC and Terre Siciliane IGP expressions. Valcerasa, Val Cerasa Etna Rosso, Carricante Terre Siciliane, and Etna Bianco Carricante carry the signature plainly.

A cellar held close to the mountain

The estate does not announce itself through built spectacle. The room is quiet, rustic, and close to the land that feeds it, with the vineyard and the cellar kept in the same conversation. Around Croce Monaci, the northern Etna air is shaped by altitude and by the protection of the Nebrodi mountains from cold northern winds. The place feels less like a staged tasting room than a working family estate, with olive groves, fruit trees, stony rows, and the black grammar of volcanic soil doing most of the speaking. In the glass, that setting matters because the wines do not read as recipes. They read as decisions made under constraint: native grapes, organic cultivation, spontaneous fermentation, and release only when the house judges the wine ready.

The line stays in the rows

Bonaccorsi became sole owner of ValCerasa in 2003, and the estate has grown from an initial holding of 3 hectares to about 18 to 20 hectares of land, with around half under vine. The scale remains part of the discipline. The next movement here is not a spectacle of expansion, but the continued transmission of a family method through the same volcanic ground, the same alberello rows, and the same Valcerasa name.