Etna Erupts in the Glass as Sicily’s Colorful Wine Plume Spreads

Etna continues to steal the limelight in the wine world of Italy’s Sicily. This year we rated over 350 wines from the island and nearly all of the two dozen wines that we rated 95 points or more were from the slopes of Europe’s most famous active volcano.

Yet, none of that prepared us for the dazzling red fruit perfume and breathtaking complexity of Benanti’s Etna Rosso Serra della Contessa Particella No. 587 Alberello Centenario Riserva 2015, a masterpiece that we are sure is just beginning a long life. It was the best wine of the tasting. Of course, that’s a long name but it tells a good part of the story of this extraordinary wine. The Benanti family has been one of the driving forces for Etna wines for more than 30 years.

They acquired the Monte Serra vineyard on the southeastern side of Etna in 1998. This steep vineyard on an extinct volcanic cone is planted with bush vines trained according to the ancient albarello system. Particella No. 587 is the one-hectare parcel at the top of the vineyard planted with centenario, or 100-year-old-plus vines. They are mostly of the grape nerello mascalese plus a smaller number of nerello cappuccio vines. For us, nerello mascalese is clearly the most exciting Sicilian red grape.

“In 2015 we decided to do the first separate vinification for No. 587 and not to release the wine until it was five years old,” Salvino Benanti said. He and his brother Antonio took over the direction of Benanti from their father, Giuseppe, in 2012 and the increase in quality has been impressive. “We basically stay very faithful to our father’s way of making terroir wines, but I think we are making more elegant wines,” he added.

'MEDITERRANEAN BURGUNDY'

What makes this achievement so striking is the fact that until now it was the vineyards on the northern flank of Etna, on soils weathered from a lava flow dating back to 1614-1624, that were widely regarded as the “Grand Cru” of the region. Now the south clearly has a place on the fine wine map of Etna.

That status has a lot to do with the fact that the northern flank of Etna is where winery Tenuta delle Terre Nere – “The Farm with the Black Soil” – was founded by Italian-American wine importer Marco de Grazia in 2002. The 2020 vintage dry whites and 2019 reds from Terre Nere were not only consistently impressive but also a good argument in support of de Grazia’s description of Etna as “Mediterranean Burgundy.” De Grazia has been a longtime promoter and spokesperson for Etna.

Terre Nere’s early success was the spark for an Etna wine boom. Some of Sicily’s leading wine companies quickly jumped on board the Etna bandwagon, while others, like Donnafugata, took their time. However, Donnafugata’s Etna Rosso Contrada Montelaguardia Fragore 2018 is a dazzling example of how nerello mascalese-dominated reds can combine great tannin structure with a silky texture. It was only the third vintage they made from this contrada, or single-vineyard site.

“2018 wasn’t the easiest vintage of my life,” said Donnafugata’s chief winemaker, Antonio Rallo, “but sometimes difficulties make you work better.” Unlike much of France, Germany and Austria, where 2018 was the hottest vintage ever recorded, in Sicily it was a cold year. Just like further north, a cold year means a late harvest and, for top producers, a lot of grape sorting to remove any grapes that don't make the grade for one reason or another. Rallo said that for his Etna reds in 2018, "we discarded 20 percent of the grapes between picking and destemming."

READ MORE: TOP 100 ITALIAN WHITE WINES FOR THE SUMMER

By comparison, our tastings confirmed the consistent excellence of 2019 for Sicilian reds and whites. 2020 also looks good for whites (the top reds have not yet been released), but it was the smallest crop since 1848. This leads us to expect a shortage of Etna wine in one to three years’ time.

This report certainly isn’t only about Etna, though. Sicily has approximately 135,000 hectares of vineyards – more than the whole of Bordeaux in France – and Etna is a small part of the overall picture. The Sicilan wine industry benefits from having a wide range of terroirs and grape varieties well suited to them. It also gains from the excellent global image of Italian wine and food while offering its own distinctive set of wines. What more could a region want?

Sadly, we noted a number of winemaking excesses that are holding back certain producers. At one end of the scale, some winemakers are picking too late and thus losing balance and fresh aromas. At the other extreme are those who willfully make overly reductive and edgy wines in order to ride the natural wine bandwagon. For us, balance is always first base for great wines.

Few people realize that the white catarratto is the most widely planted grape in Sicily. It is often blended with the carricante grape to give more freshness and a salty mineral tang to the wine. Carricante-dominated whites can be very mineral and racy with good aging potential.

We always liked the dry whites from the grillo grape, an ancient variety indigenous to Sicily, but this year it took us by storm. Suddenly it is clear how it is not only capable of making fortified Marsala and crisp, aromatic medium-bodied dry whites, but also good sparkling wines and more ambitious dry whites with some oak.

The most exciting grillo we tasted was in the latter style, the sensational Feudo Maccari Terre Siciliane Family and Friends 2020. “Climate change has been beneficial to grillo, letting the vine show its incredible resilience and drought stress resistance,” Gabriele Gorelli MW, consultant oenologist for this wine, told us. Of course, grillo doesn't appear on the label of the wine mentioned, but it is actually 100 percent grillo.

ETNA ARCHIVE: In this video from 2012, James talks to Giuseppe Benanti and tastes a selection of Benanti wines. Giuseppe handed over control of the estate to his sons Salvino and Antonio the same year.

WINE PIONEER: Marco de Grazia of Tenuta Terre Nere explains what makes the Mount Etna region such a unique wine region, in another video from 2012.

AMAZING DIVERSITY

The most important grape variety for Sicilian reds is the indigenous nero d’avola, which become a fashion wine around the last turn of the century. That popularity is easy to understand when you taste a good example brimming with black fruit and spice aroma, mouth-filling and richly textured. That’s the way the excellent red wines from the Gulfi winery in Catania tasted. We were a little surprised when they sent us their 2014 vintage single-vineyard wines, but the freshness of these seven-year-olds was seriously impressive.

An important specialty of Sicily is the Zibbibo grape, also known as Muscat of Alexandria, which makes everything from aromatic and refreshing dry whites to the luscious Passito di Pantelleria dessert wines.

Donnafugata’s Ben Ryé 2019 is the most exciting Passito from the volcanic island of Pantelleria we have tasted to date. It has a cornucopia of dried fruit aromas and a wonderful balance of exquisite sweetness and energetic freshness.

The wines of Sicily and the nearby smaller islands can seem confusingly diverse at first glance. This reflects their long history and the fact that the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Vandals, the Arabs and the Normans (Vikings from Normandy) were all in Sicily before it became an independent kingdom in 1130. History here is very complex.

One result of that complex history is more than 70 indigenous grape varieties, of which only 10 are currently being used for wine commercial wine production. However, a program is under way to rescue the rarest of them – just one vine of the red vitrarolo grape survived! – and assess their suitability for 21st-century winemaking.

But there are other signs that don’t portend as well. On Aug. 11, a weather station close to Syracuse in Sicily registered a new record high temperature for Europe: 48.8 degrees Celsius (119.8 degrees Fahrenheit). A number of important producers started the 2021 white wine harvest that day, beginning picking at dawn to avoid the worst of the heat. It was one of the earliest harvests on record.

Sicily is metaphorically and literally hot.

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated for this report by the tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many of the latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. 

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