"I come from the world of wine," Cornelissen explains. "I've travelled a lot for this, my passion. But at a certain point in my life—at exactly 40 years old—I felt the need to change direction. So I settled in Sicily, in the valley just north of Etna. I came here to get away. I made a mental map of the major wine-growing regions that produced the most elegant wines, and Sicily was on the list."
"When I started, I was searching for a precise concept: I wanted to find the lava within the bottle, which I call the liquid rock."
"I thought I was trying a Piedmontese wine," he tells me candidly, "And then instead I found out that it was from Sicily, north of Etna. My curiosity was piqued and I ended up coming here. It was in May—there was still snow on the peak of the volcano, many old vines, dry stone walls, and I said, 'Wow, what a region!' You have the microclimates, photosynthesis, geology, everything!"I believe more in the self-management of nature and of the vines. For me, it's more important to allow a fruit tree to grow in a vineyard than to repeat every year on the same day a precise treatment according to astral patterns.
In 2001, Cornelissen started his production with 500 bottles. "When I started, I was searching for a precise concept: I wanted to find the lava within the bottle, which I call the liquid rock. Not having had any oenological experience, at first I pushed all the concepts to extremes and I made very oxidized and strange wines, but it was always [rooted in] the idea of the volcano inside. And it's impossible to think that it might not be this way, because here everything is in symbiosis with the volcano, why wouldn't the wine be? I get up in the morning watching the mountain and it tells me things: I observe whether it grumbles or whether it's doing well. With the accumulation of clouds around the peak, you can tell how the weather is progressing without having to look it up online.""I'm not an oenologist and I've never followed the rules of the oenology book. If I were an oenologist, I would've produced the umpteenth bottle of boring wine, but instead I like the experimentation that tends towards a specific objective."
Cornelissen's method has allowed him to break all the constraints of modern oenology. "In the first seven harvests, I think that the wine was more of myself than it was of the soil," he recalls. "Whereas today I think it expresses Etna very well. I'm here to interpret the soil and to follow it, not to put my stamp on it. Little by little, you become wiser in life."READ MORE: Action Bronson's Guide to Drinking Natural Wine in Paris