Sicily Continues To Progress

BY IAN D'AGATA | SEPTEMBER 14, 2017 

Two thousand sixteen is another good vintage for Sicily, with the Vittoria area especially exciting thanks to many outstanding Frappatos and Cerasuolo di Vittorias. Etna, Lipari and Pantelleria also shine - and keep an eye on new wines made with Perricone, a traditional red variety that is being rediscovered.

Ask wine lovers where their favorite Italian wines come from and places like Piedmont, Tuscany and Friuli usually pop up. While it’s hard to argue with the quality of a well-made Barolo, Brunello di Montalcino or Ribolla Gialla, many of Italy’s less famous wine regions are making outstanding wines. Liguria, Sardinia, Abruzzo and Valle d’Aosta immediately spring to mind, as does Sicily. In fact, Italy’s largest island has a long and distinguished history of fine wine production, but its reputation was tarnished by the many neutral and poor efforts through most of the 20th century.

The view from Capofaro in Salina with the Lipari islands of Stromboli (to the left) and Panarea (to the right) in the background 

The Good Old Days, and Then the Bad

One of Julius Caesar’s favorite wines was known to be Sicily’s Mamertinum (Mamertino in Italian), just one of the island’s many wines that were famous in antiquity. Another wine, Tauromenitatum, produced in the island’s northeast corner, was written about by Pliny the Elder and has become the object of modern-day research and vinification attempts. We may all be tasting an updated version soon enough. In later centuries, other Sicilian wines were much sought after (Admiral Horatio Nelson was known to be a lover of Marsala); luminaries and researchers like Pastena and Mendola classified and detailed the many cultivars that were grown on the island.

Unfortunately, the mid-20th century brought about the hunt for EU subsidies and the fatal attraction for international varieties, most of which are ill-suited to Sicily’s hot climate. And I don’t just mean white grapes like Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc. Merlot is having an increasingly tough time on the island too. This led many producers to uproot old vines of local varieties or to ignore potentially high-quality local grapes altogether. Clearly, this was a recipe for disaster, as interest in Sicilian Chardonnay and Cabernet wines is minimal. The wines aren’t necessarily bad but for the most part just aren’t good enough by international standards. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. I live in Italy and I can guarantee that nobody I know - or even observe in restaurants and wine bars - ever drinks the stuff.

In fact, with few exceptions (like those from Planeta and Tasca d’Almerita), all wines made from international varieties soon proved to be difficult to sell, which inevitably led to these varieties being blended into wines made with local native grapes. But wines made out of, for example, Nero d’Avola and Inzolia blended with the internationals didn’t hold much appeal either, and wine lovers began to lose interest in the Sicilian varieties. There are few wine-business case studies more interesting and enlightening than the rise and fall of Nero d’Avola wines in Italy over what was a very short time span. The variety went from being everyone’s darling in the 1990s to an also-ran by the new century, with discount bins overflowing with these wines in shops all over Italy. Happily, for reasons I discuss below, the tide has turned and Nero d’Avola wines are hot once again.

All of this occurred while producers were moving from the archaic grape-growing and wine-production methods of the past to those more in tune with the modern world’s expectations. Clearly, in trying to make world-class wine from foreign varieties that international wine lovers and wine experts would have been more comfortable with, producers also hoped to attract attention to wines made from indigenous but little-known cultivars. Unfortunately, agriculture and winemaking involve very long learning curves. Once you plant a vineyard, it takes three years just to make wine, and at least another ten to truly understand what you have and what you are doing. It follows that those who had invested time, money and energy in planting new vines were not too keen on admitting that what seemed like a good idea at the time was anything but that. And thus the need to uproot or graft over the internationals was not immediately obvious.