Menfi, 2 February 2024. Officially debuting today in Palermo’s Botanical Garden is the new packaging for the La Segreta wine line, with the spotlight on its ecologically ultra-virtuous, “100% Sicily” bottle created in collaboration with the SOStain Foundation, on its Forest Stewardship Council-certified paper, and on new front labels that recount the origins of the name and the intimate dialogue with nature that has always inspired Planeta, both in its wines and in all its activities.
To underscore Planeta’s untiring striving for uncompromising quality and its commitment to respect for the environment and promotion of biodiversity, the restyling project drew from the work of famed Sicilian naturalist Giuseppe Riggio, who on the cusp of the 18th and 19th centuries created, with the assistance of an artist, an illustrated herbarium consisting of poetic yet precise depictions of local flora. The result of this research is the new graphic dress of La Segreta, fruit as well of a collaboration with Rovai Weber design studio, which masterfully interpreted Planeta’s sensitive relationship with a new Sicily, committed to sustainability and filled with hope. Proud of its close, decades-long relationship with its island and its distinctive growing areas, Planeta expresses, through its La Segreta wines, that indissoluble bond with nature, rich and magnanimous benefactress, who gifts her fruits to those who recognise her treasures and respect them.
The new design offers an alphabet of herbs, flowers, and roots, the expression of a hidden yet powerful beauty that reveals itself only to those who know how to admire it, a sensory cornucopia continuously poured out by La Segreta wines.
La Segreta was unveiled after a private visit to the Botanical Garden, guided by its director, Prof. Rosario Schicchi, followed by speeches by Prof. Attilio Carapezza, President of the Sicilian Natural Science Society, who shared the history of Giuseppe Raggio’s herbarium, and Susanna Weber, co-owner of the Rovai Weber studio, who illustrated the evolutionary thinking behind the new graphic image. Finally, Alessio Planeta, the company’s CEO, concluded the meeting by remembering Diego Planeta, whose birth anniversary is today.
Origins of La Segreta
Close to the ruins of the ancient Arab fortress of Mazzallakkar on the shore of lake Arancio at Sambuca di Sicilia, in a secluded spot on the Ulmo estate, lies a forest of elm and laurel trees. Following a path through the leafy trees, one arrives at a spring that once provided travellers with cool relief at night; hidden from all but the most knowledgeable, it was a near-magical spot for the Planeta family, where the adults and children camped during their explorations of the area’s natural treasures. Precisely here, many years ago, Diego Planeta told his family he intended to plant a vineyard, the starting-point of an extraordinary story of winemaking and enotourism familiar now across the globe.
Those first wines launched Planeta’s La Segreta label, which became a true line of wines in 2017 with the release of its Grillo and Nero d’Avola monovarietals. The La Segreta wines have always been grown in the vineyards owned for centuries by the Planeta family, each vineyard cultivated with passion and deep respect for its local environment. Whereas the original wine labels bore a depiction of a local 18th-century map, to underscore the wines’ deep roots in the area’s ancient past, today’s new designs boast a look that is at once contemporary and refined.
The La Segreta wines, like the entire Planeta production, are certified organic by 2022. Planta is also proud of its certification by SOStain, a foundation promoting sustainability founded in 2011 whose ten-point action programme ranges from vineyard management and use of locally-sourced raw material to energy use and transparency in communications.
