Melissa Muller was born in New York, but Sicily has been calling her for her entire life.
It began when she was two. Every summer, she traveled with her mother to stay in her Sicilian grandmother’s native town of Sant’Anna, with a population of about 600.
“I loved the farm life there with our family and my cousins,” recalls Muller. “In fact, by the time I was six and it was the end of summer, I told my mother, ‘I’m not going back to America.’”
That antic, she says with a laugh, “lasted about two days.”
While Muller continued to summer in Sicily, as a teen she also enjoyed cooking with her grandmother in New Jersey. After high school, the bright youth was driven by intense and diverse interests. She studied anthropology and Italian at Columbia University and then took a year off to get a degree from the French Culinary Institute.
Muller opened her first restaurant, Tuscan-themed Osteria del Gallo Nero, on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village in the fall of 2001—in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York’s World Trade Center—and rode it through downtown Manhattan’s comeback.
“At the time, I didn’t want to open a Sicilian restaurant. I felt it was too early,” she explains.
But in 2010, years after finishing her degree at Columbia and while enrolled part-time at Columbia Journalism School, she opened a second restaurant, called Eolo, in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. This one was purely Sicilian.
“I wanted to break people’s stereotypes of Sicilian cuisine,” she explains. “The idea was to show people that Sicilian cuisine is not the spaghetti and meatballs you saw in The Godfather.”
At Eolo, she created an all-Sicilian wine list (which earned a Wine Spectator Award of Excellence for four years running) that she paired with fare like chickpea fritters, orange and fennel salad, pasta with sea urchins, and figs stuffed with blue cheese and pancetta.
Here she also became familiar with Feudo Montoni wines. “What I loved about the line was its freshness,” she says. “I would chill the Lagnusa (a Nero d’Avola bottling that was named to Wine Spectator’s Top 100 of 2024) and serve it with tuna in pistachio crust.”
In 2013, at the prodding of an editor from Rizzoli International in New York, she began to work on Sicily, The Cookbook (2017), her own love letter to the island—unaware the project would lead to a different kind of love.
She showed up at Montoni to interview owner and winemaker Fabio Sireci in January 2014, toured the property and its vineyards of mostly old, bush vines (pruned like a bush, not supported on a trellis), saw how the estate was ensconced in nature and learned about its light-touch, organic agriculture.
She also tasted Montoni’s Nerello Mascalese, which Sireci was selling off in bulk, partly because he was fearful of competing with Etna’s new generation of more complex Nerello-based wines. She urged Sireci to bottle his simpler, but delicious, fruit-driven version.
“I loved the Nerello from here,” Muller says. “It seemed right to respect not only the story of Montoni but also of Sicily.”
In the months that followed, Muller and Sireci kept in touch long-distance, mostly by telephone—initially because Muller was trying to nail down a braised goat recipe from Sireci’s mother.
“Fabio’s mother, like all Sicilians, doesn’t explain recipes well,” she says. “And it took a month of back and forth to finish the recipe.”
After that, she says, “The calls continued.”
“Our love was very delicate and very long,” says Sireci, who, now 55, is eight years older than Muller.
Sireci invited her to vacation with him that summer at Montoni. She accepted and brought her father, an international lawyer, who at the end of the trip joked, “Melissa, if you don’t marry Fabio, I will.”
She asked Sireci if she could come work the harvest, but he protested. “He told me, ‘No, you won’t understand the harvest until you’re here 365 days a year on the farm.’”
Muller took that as an offer and returned to Montoni, suitcase in hand. After many back-and-forths to her New York restaurants, she sold them in 2016 and moved permanently to Montoni.
Sireci credits Muller with making Montoni what it is today. She began from the ground up, working in the vineyards, pruning and harvesting, and as a cellar hand. She established a garden with old varieties of peppers, eggplant and tomatoes and led Montoni’s effort to cultivate antique varieties of wheat and other grains, along with a rotation of legumes. She also pushed to establish a “museum” of vines—a five-acre vineyard that includes Montoni’s biotypes and old, abandoned vines found in nearby brush.
“A handful we have identified as antique grapes,” Sireci says. “What is really interesting are the vines—10 or so—that we don’t know.”
Marching through a vineyard full of chest-high spring growth, including wild broccoli greens, mustard, nettles, wild peas and honeysuckle, Muller is a keen observer of vines and their environment.
“I’m an anthropologist,” she says. “I need to do fieldwork. I’m living my fieldwork.”
The latest chapter for the couple began in February 2020 when they married. During the COVID lockdown that followed, the couple honeymooned at Montoni.
By the end of the year, their first of two sons was born and named Elio after Sireci’s father. To commemorate the occasion, Sireci finally agreed to bottle Nerello Mascalese once again under a label called Terre di Elio.
“Here, I wanted to make a wine that expressed its pure fruit,” Sireci says.
Today, a key part of the wine work here happens about every two weeks when Sireci, Muller and their Marsala-based enologist, Angelo Rubino, each separately blind taste the nearly 200 tanks and barrels in Montoni’s cellars.
“I am never satisfied,” says Sireci. “I never gave nine points [out of 10]. Sometimes I give 8.”
Since leaving the big city for deep Sicily, Muller hasn’t looked back. “I’ve become Sicilian,” she says. “That’s not easy.”
She’s also become part of the wine world, which she calls “the most interesting work in the world.”
“It’s so varied every day,” she says. “We can be here with mud under our fingernails and on our bodies, and the next day go to a gala somewhere in the world. The contrasts are fantastic.”
To learn about the origins of Feudo Montoni, the work Fabio Sireci has done and the evolution of the estate's wines, read “Wine and Love on an Ancient Sicilian Farm: Defining Feudo Montoni (Part 1)”.
