When life hands you grapes, you make wine. Writer John Henderson meets a Californian-Sicilian couple who found a vineyard near their Umbrian home and turned it into one of the region's most promising new wineries. So you want to have a winery in Italy, huh? Sit on your porch looking out at your vineyard on the hill, sipping the fruits of your labour under a warm sun, a plate of pasta in front of you as the church bells peal from a nearby village?

Here’s one reality. You’re in sleeping bags on the floor of an 800-year-old stone house with no electricity, heat or water. It takes you seven years to get a building permit. You realize that your land really isn’t your land. You have no money and take equipment from strangers on the promise you’ll pay them later. How? Who knows?