In the 15 years since, we underdogs have supported each other. The experimental and defiant wines, made from indigenous grapes, found a clientele only in small, unconventional restaurants, and reciprocally, these idiosyncratic restaurants became more exciting by introducing guests to something new. Perhaps that’s why I have a particular allegiance to these wines. But early on, the attraction was simple: They were the delicious and opinionated wines I wanted to drink with the deeply personal food I wanted to cook.

When I step off the plane in Palermo and take a deep lungful of the hot, early September air, thick with the smell of day-old brushfire and manure, I am jolted. Those first highly aromatic inhales are a vivid, uncannily familiar introduction to a land I’ve only ever sipped from a bottle. Within minutes I understand something more about these wines I’ve known, with their sometimes challenging personalities.

Like everyone, I’m intimidated when talking about wine. I’m about to spend a week touring the countryside, meeting the winemakers whose wines I have been serving all these years, and I am braced for the trip to be one long successive put-down by those wine types we have all met, the ones with the silk ties and the pursed lips. But if this is how Sicily introduces itself — as a terroir of brushfire and cow shit — how high and uptight can it be?

The two jovial guys at the car rental place relax me further. After putting me in a stick-shift tin-can Fiat, they settle into the more nuanced matter of my GPS system. Do I prefer a male or a female voice? I laugh out loud and start to describe the girl I’d like — perhaps a dark, Sicilian beauty? Hardworking but with a sense of humor? They are chuckling, too. Do I prefer Chiara? Or maybe Jessica? They both laugh and nod in fraternal agreement on Jessica’s merits. But would they be remiss not to highly recommend Benedetta?

Soon Chiara and I are on the highway. Along the coast at first, and then up into the mountains, off the main road, and then onto gravelly, cracked pavement. I come to giant windmills standing stark on the hilltop like colossal white-winged angels. I turn off the engine and listen to the profound, oxymoronic nothingness of wind, and the whispering rhythm of the spinning blades — a brief but singular moment in which I get hold of my insecurities before I meet the aristocratic Tasca family at their estate, Regaleali.

The property is regal. The vineyards march on in endless neat, harmonic rows. Workers eat their paper-wrapped homemade lunches under a tree. A bright Tunisian-blue bench, a few cats, and an intoxicating arc of blooming jasmine welcome you into the courtyard. And the count himself, Lucio Tasca, stands on the balcony looking out on it all.

Alberto, Lucio’s gentle son, greets me, accompanied by his own boisterous young children, elegant wife, and slightly muddy dog, and instantly I am at ease. The thing that has brought me to this vineyard, in a way, is my own youngest son. When Leone was born, we carried a Regaleali catarratto at Prune, also called Leone, referencing the lion in the Tasca family crest so, of course, I had to come here first.