On May 18th Oxford and Cambridge Alumni living in Sicily met up in Palermo for the first time. The event was organised by Salvatore La Spina (Pembroke,1988) and Marco Adragna (Kellogg, Oxford) and aimed at bringing together Alumni from all over the island.

The event was held at Ristorante Cin Cin and was sponsored by the two organisers and by prominent Sicilian wine producers, Firriato, Planeta and Abbazia Sant'Anastasia, which offered samples of their best bottles for free tasting.

We were delighted to welcome professor Richard Cooper from Oxford University who entertained the audience on the topic of quality wine and gave us a general idea of which types are currently preferred across the channel.

A challenge between Oxford and Cambridge was then launched. As different types of wine were served every ten minutes, the two teams had to tell which wine was which out of a choice of five. It must be said the all the wine was superb, especially the kind distilled out of the excellent red grape Nero d'Avola.

Although it was the closing day of Palermo World's Windsurf Festival, the free wine tasting and an article on the local newspaper drew quite a few friends from Palermo, Catania and Trapani thus contributing to the success of the event. The reader might like to know that the Cambridge team won the challenge albeit, admittedly, by sheer luck.