2014 Mille e Una Notte

This year’s visit to Donnafugata included a six-vintage vertical of their flagship Mille e Una Notte, ranging from 2006 up to the newly released 2021. I’ve been singing this wine’s praises for many years, and now I wish I’d followed my advice and added more to my cellar along the way. The Mille e Una Notte is a blend of Nero d'Avola, Syrah and a mix of interplanted indigenous varieties aged for 14 months in new French oak barriques. When this wine sheds its new oak, what remains is something that I can best compare to old-school Bordeaux. With that said, it’s the Ben Ryé, a Passito di Pantelleria dessert wine, that I most closely associate with this estate. Ben Ryé is one of the best sweet wines in Italy, but also among the best in the world. Readers should also pay attention to Donnafugata’s Dolce & Gabbana bottlings. While I typically wouldn’t associate a partnership with a major international designer to be the best source for serious wine, this selection proves otherwise. Best of all, Donnafugata continues to excel with a wide range of value-oriented wines produced in volumes that make them very easy to source. This is a family-run estate with a focus not only on their own success, but the success of Sicilian wine as a whole. 

A huge estate, Donnafugata manages to combine quantity with quality in a way that very few (and I mean very few) other Italian estates are capable of. Donnafugata currently produces 2.5 million bottles, 1.3 million of which are their highly successful entry-level wines, such as Damarino, Anthilia and Sedara; the other 1.2 million bottles are divided up among 17 different labels, some of which are at the top of Italy’s wine quality hierarchy. And interestingly enough, the estate continues to launch new wines made from different grapes that had not been previously grown. But owner Antonio Rallo is a viticulturist and winemaker by trade, and so he has always known of the Frappato variety’s potential as well as the many delicious wines increasingly being made in the Cerasuolo di Vittoria denomination (a Nero d’Avola–Frappato blend). Furthermore, on Rallo’s travels abroad, it struck him that even people who liked their reds big and meaty always seemed to take a shine to wines made with Frappato. All this led to Donnafugata buying or renting 31 hectares in three different Acate contrade: Biddine Soprano, Biddine Sottano and Isola Cavaliere, where they have also built a new winery so as to start making their own Frappato and Cerasuolo di Vittoria wines.

But Donnafugata could not stay away from Etna either, and has invested there too, releasing its first-ever Etna Rosso wine in 2018. In fact, the Rallo family had planned to make an Etna wine long before then, as Antonio’s father Giacomo was already set on buying vineyards there in the early 1980s, but volcanic activity put the project on hold. At last, a winery was bought in 2017 on the northern slope (the best for Etna’s red wines, it is also the less rainy part of the volcano). At the present time, Donnafugata owns vineyards in four Randazzo contrade and one in Passopisciaro, and is in the process of buying more. So far the estate has released one Etna Rosato, an entry-level Etna Rosso (called Sul Vulcano) made from a blend of grapes from different vineyards, and their top-of-the-line Etna Rosso Fragore, from the Montelaguardia cru; another cru wine is resting in the cellars but has not yet been released. Neither has their Carricante wine, thus far made in very small volumes because there isn’t that much Carricante on the northern slope of Etna to begin with.