Sicily: Where Great Wines and Lava Flow

BY IAN D'AGATA | AUGUST 06, 2019

Sitting down and writing my annual Sicily report has never been so exciting. I don’t remember the last time I tasted through so many world-class wines, both white and red, from Sicily; probably never, in fact. In a nutshell, that’s what you need to know about the state of Sicilian wine today: while the potential for memorable wines has always been there, it appears that at long last many of the island’s estates (though certainly not all) are finally starting to harness that potential.

As the days wore on (there weren’t exactly a small number of wines to write about), I began to worry that I might actually be underestimating the quality of some of the wines I was tasting! Call it a vinous Stendhal’s syndrome if you like (that condition when people are overwhelmed from taking in too much beauty, as might happen in a museum). Nevertheless, the bevy of fine wines I saw - white and red, dry and sweet - is a testament to the positive changes implemented in vineyard and winery practices all over the island in the last ten years. Visit any good to very good Sicilian estate today and you can’t help but come away with an impression of palpable energy, pride and hope. The number of wineries where I saw this much passion was far fewer twenty or thirty years ago. People seem to realize they are on the cusp of something special, and that the wines really do have something to say on the world stage.

True, this report might be slightly skewed in that it covers the wines from two vintages (2016 and 2017) that were both above average in quality. Two thousand-sixteen especially appears to be one of the greatest Sicilian vintages ever. Broad vintage generalizations are difficult with as large a region as Sicily. At 27,662 square kilometers, it is Europe’s seventh largest island, and it boasts myriad different mesoclimates, exposures, soils, wind currents and more. That fact recognized, 2016 really does appear to have delivered the goods in most of the island’s production zones. AS for the 2017s, they have turned out much better in Sicily than they did in the rest of Italy.

This vineyard on Etna is part of Planeta's vast holdings

Turning the Tide

Most people associate Sicily with a history of mostly cheap bulk wine, but in fact the island has a long and distinguished pedigree of very fine wines too. However, the late 19th century and most of the 20th were not kind to Sicily’s viticulture and winemaking, with the likes of phylloxera, the world wars, sharecropping, and abject poverty causing wines to suffer in the process. A spike in quality was finally registered in the late 1980s, but that was nothing compared to the upward surge that is taking place on the island today. The current scene is a very different one from that of even the recent past. Sicily’s most highly touted wines, those that were making all the headlines only 30 years ago, were hardly anything to write home about, and reports of Sicily being the “new California of Italy” were greatly exaggerated. It is true that in the late 1980s and 1990s there began an encouraging, even exciting, move toward better viticulture and cleaner winemaking, but the fact is that many of those wines, despite all their positive press, carried almost caricatural amounts of new oak and high alcohol levels; others were clean but nondescript. Even worse, many offered no tie to either the land or the grape variety they were supposedly being made with. For example, legions of Catarrattos brought Chardonnay to mind; Moscato di Noto wines (which should be made with Moscato Bianco) tasted of Zibibbo more than anything else (Zibibbo is a different Muscat variety from Moscato Bianco, better known outside of Italy as Muscat of Alexandria); and Nero d’Avola wines reeked of coffee and chocolate (descriptors you ought to associate with Merlot wines, not those made with Nero d’Avola – unless a huge amount of toasty new oak is lavished on the stuff). Back then, the wines of Etna (nowadays the hottest wine area not just of Sicily but of all of Italy) were nowhere in sight; there was only one Faro and only one Malvasia delle Lipari of any commercial significance; wines labeled Cerasuolo di Vittoria and those made with Frappato (two of Italy’s biggest wine success stories of the last 20 years) were then mostly forgettable; and much-hyped Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay wines of those times were, compared to the best from Bordeaux and Napa, extremely poor. In other words, there really wasn’t that much to get excited about, though I suppose, given the situation, that finally just making cleaner wines was cause for jubilation.