(ANSA) - Excitement is mounting for this Sunday's concert in Acireale by the British pop group Simply Red, whose flame-haired singer Mick Hucknall has a vineyard on the nearby slopes of Mt. Etna.
The Sicilian date is the group's only concert in southern Italy during Simply Red's current Italian tour. The band opened it tour in Padua on December 14, moves on to Rome on the 15 and after the Acireale concert will close in their tour Milan on December 21.
Simply Red last played Sicily in July 2003 when they performed in the ancient theatre in Taormina, a spectacular event recorded and sold on DVD.
This time around Hucknall will be bringing with him a ten-man band as well as a 12-member string sections to
perform material from his latest album 'Simplified', including the new single 'Perfect Love'.
They will of course also play as such Simply Red classics as 'Holding Back the Years' and 'Something Got Me Started'. Hucknall, who lived in Italy during the 1990s and still has a house in Milan, bought a vineyard several years ago on the slopes Mt. Etna, near the town of San Alfio, and became seriously involved in winemaking , with the help of Veronese wine producer and connoisseur Carlo Nerozzi.
By 2003 he was ready to bottle his first wine which he called Il Cantante (the Singer) and then presented at the 2004 VinItaly trade fair in Verona. Speaking at the presentation, the Simply Red singer said that "it was all really exciting. I took part in every stage of production from the selection of the ground to the choice of the label to the description of the wine, which I've decided to leave in Italian all over the world".
Looking ahead, he added "we're really counting on our Etna Rosso grapes. We've also produced some really good Nerod'Avola and we're expanding the vineyard on the north side of the volcano to make a full-bodied white".
Earlier this year Hucknall presented the second vintage of Il Cantante and proved that just like in the music
business, his success has been the fruit of a clever mix of marketing and finance, with the Banco di Sicilia (BdS) coming into the wine promotion.
Sicily's biggest bank has offered 24,000 bottles of Hucknall's Nero d'Avola at its branches, and sold them all
off three weeks earlier than expected. The bank has benefited too, thanks to a boost to its image and an estimated 30,000 euros' worth of extra banking earnings.
Sicilian wines have enjoyed a boom in the last couple of years and have dropped their cinderella status as fillers for French wines to produce some award-winning reds and whites. The Simply Red singer is not the first celebrity to be bitten by the Sicilian winemaking bug. Three years ago, French actress Carole Bouquet bought a vineyard, with her then-boyfriend actor Gerard Depardieu, on the island of Pantelleria to make their own version of its famous raisin dessert wine, passito.
Another British pop musician, Jim Kerr of Scottish rock band Simple Minds, has also bought a Sicilian vineyard.
