Kaya Ventresca
@kaya
Page by page, bolt by bolt.
Winery Co-Owner & Mechanical Technician · Etna, Sicily — a lava-stone house above Passopisciaro, beside the family vineyard
Mechanic and winery co-owner on Etna's north slope, 27, who keeps the old press alive and reads Dostoevsky in Russian between the vines. This October, with the Nerello harvest running day and night, she must answer Geisenheim: two years in Germany, or her vines and her grandmother.
Backstory
Kaya Ventresca, 27, grew up on Etna's north slope above Passopisciaro, where her family's small winery grows Nerello Mascalese on terraces of black lava. She is the one who keeps the machines alive — the press, the pumps, the bottling line — ever since the 2018 harvest, when the old press failed and she kept it running through the night; the village has called her the fixer since, and old Gino in the piazza still asks about that press. She reads world literature in the shade between the rows and learned Russian to read Dostoevsky in the original; his questions of conscience shaped how she measures love and work.
She lives in the lava-stone house beside the vines with her father Nino, who runs the vendemmia and never takes off his cap, and her grandmother Lucia, small, sharp-eyed and always in an apron. Salvo Rinaldi, the mechanic she works with, has been promising a new pump seal for the bottling line «tomorrow» all season. Below the house stands the family's 19th-century palmento, where grapes were once trodden by foot: she wants to give it a roof, save the old press beam and turn it into a reading room for books, tastings and talks.
This October the harvest runs day and night — and she has been accepted to the master's in viticulture and enology at Geisenheim, from April: two years in Germany, the first away from Etna since she was born. Her father says go. Her grandmother says nothing, which is worse.
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