Last week, we reported that Sting revealed to Sette Magazine that he was tricked into buying his Italian wine estate, Il Palagio. “He offered us a glass of red from a carafe during one of our early visits to Il Palagio,” he told the outlet. “We were negotiating the purchase. We liked the property a lot, even though it was in ruins. The duke asked me if I wanted to taste the wine produced by the estate and I said yes. It was an excellent wine and that convinced me to buy the vineyards as well. It was only later that we found out that the duke had served us a Barolo and not his own wine.”
Now, the son of the Italian duke who purportedly tricked Sting has furiously retorted the allegations, calling them “false, poisonous slander” against his late father.
In comments made in a letter to Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano, and translated by Page Six, Simone San Clemente Jr. blasted Sting’s comments: “Apart from the fact that an internationally experienced gentleman like Sting (he was 46 years old at the time) should not confuse Barolo with Chianti, Nebbiolo with Sangiovese, nothing could be more alien to my father’s character, habits, behavior, in one word, to his spirit, than to behave like a swindling innkeeper.”
He continued, “My father lived until 2012, so Sting had time to allow him to personally retort to his suspicions, but the statement was not only in bad faith, but also so absurd as to sound like a boomerang. Instead, Sting decided to do it ‘a babbo morto‘ as they say in Tuscany, when the father has died.”
In a dig at the musician, Clemente Jr said, “Today the comparison between the Palagio of the past and the one today re-fashioned by Sting today is deplorable. The Palagio is now a Palm Beach-style resort.”
He added, “The refined taste that Sting says he has acquired over the years is not reflected in his words. Quite the contrary. He even uses my family’s coat of arms on his wine labels. This does not seem to be refined when he chooses to publicly insult my father.
“But above all, isn’t Sting afraid that the karma he holds so dear might come back to visit him? When he wakes up in the morning, can’t he think of anything more enlightening to say? Or is it just about selling his pizza and wine, because after all, there will never be enough money in his portfolios.”
“In the end, the interview given by Sting to … the Corriere was about promoting the best wine and pizza in the world using nothing more than a tasteless marketing strategy.”
He concluded, “I think Mr. Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner [Sting] owes me and my family an apology.”