Our family history
It was the sixties and Italy was experiencing a time of great economic development, a collective excitement, everything seemed easy and within reach, but it was just an illusion. Sicily was a land full of contradictions, illiteracy and poverty on one side and landowners and aristocrats on the other.
The vision of a man who could see ahead in time gave life to a dream in a small town in the province of Enna, Piazza Armerina , with the creation of a winery with technologically advanced systems and an oenological concept ahead of its time. Francesco Furnari 's vision lasted about twenty years and today is reborn by his family after almost forty years.
"excellence of Sicilian winemaking in the world"
In the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s, Vinicola Furnari was a cutting-edge winery, with a winemaking line and two latest-generation bottling lines, with a production capacity of 10,000 bottles per day, twenty-nine reinforced concrete tanks of one hundred hectolitres each, located in an underground cellar, also for ageing purposes, twenty tanks for winemaking, four cold storage rooms, two autoclaves, a refrigeration system, two pasteurisation systems, all located in an area of 2,500 m2.
The company exported its wines throughout Europe, the United States and Latin America; the quality mark of the Sicily Region, which Furnari wines enjoyed, was an acknowledgement that was not taken for granted for the winemaking of the time. An acknowledgement that did not take long to arrive also at an international level, thanks to numerous awards and results. The Velvety (rosé obtained from Calabrese, today known throughout the world as Nero D'Avola) in addition to obtaining the highest awards during the Green Week in Berlin in 1970, was classified by the press of the time in first place among European wines, even surpassing French rosé wines, while the Flaming (red obtained from Calabrese and Nero Cappuccio grapes) received awards in the United States in Los Angeles, Brussels and Frankfurt am Main.
The press of the time classified Furnari wines among the best Italian wines exported to the world.
Francesco Furnari
Ciccio Furnari - Franco Giacosa
Ciccio Furnari
Stand Furnari anni '70
Convegno Nazionale Alberghiero, con Lorenzo Mazzone. 1977
Lidia Furnari Gaeta
"after forty years, thanks to Fabio Furnari and Ciccio's grandchildren, Furnari wines are reborn"
The winemaking methods and recipes, obtained after a long period of ampelographic research and experimentation in the early 1960s by Francesco Furnari together with the winemaker from Alba Lurgo, reflected a concept that arrived in the major Sicilian wineries about twenty years later.
In the late 1960s, Francesco Furnari took on a young and brilliant novice winemaker from Alba, who had just graduated, and took him to heart: Franco Giacosa remained at the winery for seven years; then he was hired by Corvo - Duca di Salaparuta and later became the technical director of Zonin. Today he is recognized as the "father" of Nero D'Avola and one of the most esteemed professionals in the sector.
That dream was interrupted by the premature death of Francesco Furnari in the early 1980s, in a land that was, at that time, full of contradictions.
Almost forty years later, our family, thanks to the legacy preserved by Fabio Furnari , who since the age of ten followed in his father's footsteps in the cellar, together with all of Ciccio's grandchildren, has been able to realize the dream of collecting an important legacy, a story that has distant roots, the charm of a good Sicilian wine, of a family tradition and of a passion that bind generations over time: the love for a land and for its sweetest fruit.
Although the Vinicola di Piazza Armerina is now in disuse, we decided to start again from one of those territories of great wine vocation chosen by Francesco Furnari for his wines, that of the province of Caltanissetta, in the Sicilian hinterland. We thus found in the wine areas of Butera the place and the lands suitable for returning to produce Sicilian wine of great intensity, genuine and capable of representing the soul of this territory, with the precious support of Mimmo and Antonino Ortoleva and the oenologist Donato Lovecchio, together with whom we have revived the ancient recipes and the tradition of Vini Furnari.
