Sardinia on a Roll

BY IAN D’AGATA | OCTOBER 11, 2016  

There are few more exciting wine-production areas in Italy today than Sardinia. Family-run estates and cooperatives are producing a bevy of high-quality, generally inexpensive red and white wines that deserve to be better known. Add in some of Italy’s best rosés and sweet wines, and Sardinia offers something for everyone, beginners and experts alike.

Sardinia’s estates and social cooperatives are clearly more confident and goal-directed—and better equipped—than they were 20 years ago, and the island’s wines just keep getting better. Co -ops have been shooting for—and achieving—quality as well as quantity. The region’s many smartly run family estates, while remaining for the most part proudly anchored to tradition, are now making cleaner and more precise wines that are more in tune with today’s fast-paced lifestyles. The fact that Sardinia’s wines are generally not expensive is an added bonus.

It All Starts with the Grapes 

Along with Campania, Piedmont, Friuli-Venezia-Giulia and Valle d’Aosta, Sardinia is the region in Italy that relies most heavily on indigenous cultivars. There’s little emphasis on international grapes that, in Italy at least, often give wines of limited interest compared to wines made elsewhere in the world from the same varieties. The key to Sardinia’s success is the high quality of the island’s native grapes, one obvious example being Cannonau, a local biotype of Grenache. Sardinia’s Carignan wines have long been viewed—and not just by me—as the best made anywhere in the world. No other wine region has anywhere near the success with Vermentino (the Rolle or Malvoisie Gros Grains of southern France and the Mediterranean basin) that Sardinia has. In fact, Vermentino wines are selling so well that many southern French producers have taken to referring to their versions by their Italian name (charmingly pronouncing it Vermentinò, with the accent on the “o”), abandoning the use of “Rolle.” This is a rather unusual step for the French, which tells you something about the success these Sardinian wines have met in wine-loving circles everywhere.

Vernaccia Vineyards in Oristano