Milan Wine Week: Cusumano wins the 2026 Wine Hospitality Awards

Cusumano , a Sicilian winery led by Diego and Alberto Cusumano, a leading national and international wine producer, has won the inaugural Wine Hospitality Awards 2026 in the "Best Art & Culture Wine Hospitality" category. This award recognizes Italian excellence that has distinguished itself for its ability to create distinctive, memorable, and relevant hospitality experiences around the world of wine, helping to define new standards of Italian wine hospitality. The prize, awarded during the ninth edition of Milano Wine Week, running from Saturday, October 17th to Sunday, October 25th, is a prestigious event that places wine at the center of Milan's neighborhoods, involving restaurants, wine bars, wine shops, hotels, showrooms, museums, and cultural spaces with over one hundred initiatives, including tastings, masterclasses, talks, and shared experiences. And experience itself was one of the underlying themes of the event, with the new features of the 2026 edition of the Wine Hospitality Forum and the Wine Hospitality Awards, which recognized 50 Italian wineries across ten categories: from Luxury Wine Hospitality to wine tourism related to gastronomy, wellness, nature, art, architecture, and design. The growing importance of hospitality and (winery) tourism, and the connection between the travel experience and the local area and production culture, is underscored by recent Nomisma data, which estimated that in 2025, overall wine tourism revenue for Italian wineries was €3.1 billion. And, according to data presented by expert Roberta Garibaldi, president of Aite-Italian Association of Food and Wine Tourism, 18 million Italians participated in wine-related experiences in 2026, 4.5 million more than in 2024. "This award repays us for all the efforts and investments we've made over the years in winery hospitality, developing it and making it a key part of our offering ," comments Diego Cusumano, winemaker and owner, with his brother Alberto, of the Sicilian winery of the same name. " Efforts that culminated this year, with great pride, with the inauguration of the first immersive multisensory experience designed to bring the diverse universe of the Sicilian territories where our vineyards are located to life in a single location." "The wine tourism sector represents a key driver of tourism growth, and we're certainly not just discovering this today ," Cusumano continues, " but what's important to understand are the still significant opportunities for expansion in this market segment, which relies on the connection between the quality of the experience and the connection to the territory, where digital, combined with the human element, enriches the story and amplifies the sensorial experience. And it is precisely this relationship that underpins our immersive experience , The Unseen Terroirs. An experience that, through videos, sounds, projections, aromas, and sensations, envelops the guest and instantly transports them on an imaginative journey through the Cusumano territories, exploring the profound connection between nature, time, and memory ."