What led one of the richest and learned men in 19th Century Europe to die in a far-off rural area in southern Italy? Henri D’Orleans, duke of Aumale, was the son of Louis Philippe, the French “bourgeois king” who had been forced to give up his royal status. In spite of his brilliant military career at the service of his country, in 1848 Henri was expelled from France and in 1853 he took refuge in an immense farming estate in Zucco, 40 km off the Sicilian city of Palermo. Here he devoted himself to agriculture and, with the help of the most advanced French methods of winemaking, started making a very distinctive wine. During the last years of his life he pursued the goal of creating an outstanding “natural” wine, made without any enological shortcut: an extraordinary achievement at a time where the industry standard were the British-influenced wines from Marsala (a different area of Sicily), fortified with the addition of alcohol so to become stable enough for the long sea voyage to the London markets. With Henri’s death, the wine from Zucco fell into oblivion, but echoes of its fame survived through the decades in the tales told by old farmers to the younger generations, eventually coming to the attention of organic citrus grower Pietro Galioto: after a long research on this forgotten gem, Pietro has decided to revive the wine from Zucco and bring it back to its glory. Past and present intertwine in a story that spans over 160 years of European history, revealing the long-forgotten vision of a pioneer of todays’ trend towards a “natural wine”.