Etna Rossos should be an excellent education for wine lovers who might confuse flavor concentration with the form or mouthfeel of the wines. The best are usually concentrated but hardly hefty, round or viscous.
The pale nerello mascalese, often enhanced by the slightly darker nerello cappuccio, makes for confidently transparent, medium-bodied and structured wine that can easily be overlooked by those who only seek what is most conspicuous in a bottle.
They are nimble and nuanced wines, toned by the bright berry fruit and the strikingly dusty, ashy notes that are considered a part of the terroir’s dark, volcanic intrigue. The century-old vines that concentrate the quintessential flavors in a pristine, mineral, and linear package offer an unforgettable aesthetic experience.
As a late-ripening variety, nerello mascalese almost perfectly reflects the personality of each harvest and provenance of the wine, much like pinot noirs and nebbiolos do. The Etna Rosso wines that champion the cool and rainy vintages, like 2018, are also more likely to transmit that pinot noir red-fruit elegance and sensibility with a bit of herbal, ashy, sulfurous wildness.
The best that come from warmer, drier years, like 2017, might be better defined by their angular structure, spicy Mediterranean character and tarry, mineral, and dried-fruit accent – something that may otherwise lead you to think of a minerally nebbiolo, Brunello/Chianti or a high-toned grenache.
At the heart of great Etna wines is the focus on the vineyard, and increasingly, the "cru/Contrada" concept is taking Etna's unique terroir to the next level, which might explain why Marco de Grazia of leading producer Tenuta delle Terre Nere would describe Etna as the "Mediterranean Burgundy." There are now 133 crus in Etna, with a much higher concentration of single vineyards on the northern slope in the townships of Castiglione di Sicilia and Randazzo.
