Donnafugata's Mille e Una Notte: 1995-2011

BY IAN D’AGATA | DECEMBER 22, 2016

Sicily’s red wines, even the good ones, carry a monkey on their shoulders. Namely, most people think of them as broad, fleshy behemoths sporting superripe if not downright overripe aromas and flavors and unwieldy alcohol levels. But this is clearly not the case with the region’s best wines made from its two mostly widely known native red grapes, Nerello Mascalese and Nero d’Avola. This Vinous exclusive, a report on the first complete vertical tasting to date of Donnafugata’s Mille e Una Notte, demonstrates how refined and harmonious truly great Nero d’Avola wines can be.

The barrel cellar at Donnafugata

The Birth of a Modern Southern Italian Icon

Donnafugata launched their Mille e Una Notte red wine in 1995, in collaboration with Giacomo Tachis, perhaps Italy’s most famous modern winemaker. Tachis was responsible for many other famous Italian red wines, including Tignanello, Sassicaia, d’Alceo, Sammarco, Turriga and Pelago). In the early ‘90s, Tachis started creating new wines for Donnafugata, either made with international grapes alone or from blends of international and native grapes. These included a Nero d’Avola-Cabernet Sauvignon blend called Tancredi (first made in 1990) and the oak-aged Chardonnay named Chiarandà del Merlo (1992 was the first vintage; the blend has changed over the years, and the name of the wine was later shortened simply to Chiarandà).

It was perhaps inevitable that, sooner or later, a top monovariety wine from the island’s most abundant and iconic red grape, Nero d’Avola, would be born. In 1995, while tasting the best lots of Nero d’Avola in the Donnafugata cellar and being blown away by their quality, Tachis suggested that the time was right to launch just such a wine. Antonio Rallo, whose family owns Donnafugata, still remembers vividly how, upon tasting the first Mille e Una Notte ever made, he immediately rushed home to tell his mother Gabriella that “today we have made the best wine ever at Donnafugata!” Clearly, she was of the same opinion, and she decided the wine’s name should be Mille e Una Notte (or The Thousand and One Nights) because, in her view, the wine was so good that each bottle told a new, different and magical story, much like in the Arabian tales of the One Thousand and One Nights (in which the beautiful and crafty Sheherazade repeatedly prolongs her execution by keeping the Persian King Shahryar up each night by telling one marvelous tale after another).