Tell Me Wine 20 — Sicily × Belgium: A Fermentation Story

📅 Friday, 27 November 2026
🕖 19:00
📍 Leiden — exact address shared with confirmed participants

At first sight, Sicily and Belgium do not have very much in common.

One is Mediterranean, volcanic and covered in vineyards.

The other is considerably flatter, considerably wetter, and much better known for beer.

Look a little closer, however, and the distance between the two starts becoming surprisingly small.

For Tell Me Wine 20, we’re going to follow the connections that have developed between these two apparently distant wine and fermentation cultures.

Not Sicily versus Belgium.

Not half the evening in one country and half in the other.

But a journey through the people, ideas, ingredients and approaches to fermentation that have travelled between them.

From north to south — and back again

Over the last few decades, Sicily has become one of the most exciting places in European wine.

Etna alone has gone from being a relatively marginal wine region to one of the most closely watched terroirs in the world, while elsewhere across the island a new generation of producers has rediscovered old grapes, vineyards and ways of working.

Belgium has played a surprisingly interesting role in that story.

Belgian wine professionals and winemakers have travelled south, settled in Sicily and become part of its contemporary wine culture.

At the same time, the exchange has travelled in the opposite direction.

Belgium has one of Europe’s most extraordinary traditions of spontaneous fermentation, and in recent years the worlds of wine, lambic and other forms of fermentation have increasingly started talking to each other.

Grapes move north.
Ideas move south.
Winemakers meet brewers.
Fruit ends up somewhere it was never traditionally supposed to be.

And eventually the borders between categories begin to look rather less solid.

What are we drinking?

That remains a secret.

As always with Tell Me Wine, I won’t publish the line-up in advance.

What I can tell you is that we’ll taste at least 12 wines, selected to explore Sicily and its connections with Belgium from a number of different angles.

Expect different grapes, territories, styles and philosophies.

Some connections will be obvious.

Others considerably less so.

The point is to discover the story through the glasses, rather than reading the answers beforehand.

Food

There will, of course, also be food throughout the evening.

This time the table will take inspiration from both Sicily and Belgium, accompanying the tasting without trying to turn every pairing into a geography exam.

As always, the wine remains at the centre of the evening — but nobody should be drinking twelve-plus glasses on an empty stomach (maybe).

How Tell Me Wine works

Tell Me Wine is a guided tasting, but you don’t need any previous wine knowledge to join.

We taste together, compare, talk about the places and people behind the wines, and gradually build the story of the evening.

No blind-test competitions.

No requirement to identify obscure grape varieties from three metres away.
Just curiosity, conversation and quite a lot of wine.

The tasting costs €40 per person, including all wines and food.

After you RSVP, I’ll send you a private message with the payment link. Your
place is confirmed only once payment has been received.

The exact Leiden address will be shared with confirmed participants before the event.

Sicily and Belgium may not look like the most obvious pairing.
Which is probably a good reason to put them on the same table.