Spilling the secret on Sicilian wines

Arenaissance in wine-growing in Sicily means the Italian island now produces about the same volume of wine as the entire continent of Australia. If you're a wine drinker, that means you'll be sipping Sicilian wine one of these days. Many of the island's best wines are already being imported to Minnesota. The growth has been a result of investors, mostly Italian, who are taking advantage of Sicily's relatively inexpensive land prices and balmy weather to produce much improved wines.

Sicily has been a workhorse wine producer since the Greeks first planted it with vines, but for centuries, most Sicilian wine was shipped out in bulk and blended with wine from other places -- and even used in northern Italian vermouth. Merely 5 percent or so was actually bottled as Sicilian wine, and the majority of that was the sherrylike fortified wine of Marsala, not the dry table wines most of us drink today.

In past years, the only widely distributed Sicilian table wines were the red and white corvo wines from the previously government-owned Duca di Salaparuta winery, but that's changing. Among the more exciting Sicilian wines are value-priced varietal wines from Feudo Arancio, international-style wines from wineries such as Planeta and Donnafugata, and uniquely Sicilian but updated wines from producers such as Tenuta delle Terre Nere, Cusumano and Azienda Agricola COS. Even Duca di Salaparuta is now owned by private investors and the wines are dramatically better.

Northern vintners head south

One of the biggest investors in Sicilian wine in the past decade has been the MezzaCorona Group, a large producer of varietals from Veneto and Trentino in northern Italy. Since 2001, MezzaCorona has purchased and planted two very large properties in Sicily. With global wine consumption rising, particularly in the United States, successful exporters such as MezzaCorona are looking for sources of reasonably priced wine, especially plump, ripe warm-climate reds of the sort that Sicily's climate can produce.

Alex Repola, director of operations for Prestige Imports, a partner in MezzaCorona and the American importer of its wines, says that cheap land prices and demand for export-quality full-bodied red wines have led to a "race to the south" in Italy. "We can produce reds in northern Italy, but we can produce really, really nice reds in southern Italy at a fraction of what it costs to produce them in northern Italy," Repola said.

In 2001, MezzaCorona bought a 2,200-acre estate in Sambuca di Sicilia in southwestern Sicily called Feudo Arancio. Two years later, the company purchased another 1,550 acres near Ragusa in the southeast. Both properties have state-of-the-art wineries. "You have to go in there, rip everything out and start from scratch," says Repola. The upside is that "you have excellent growing conditions and a lot of land to grow the vines on. What comes out of it, if properly cared for, is phenomenal quality wine."

Feudo Arancio's wines include international varieties such as chardonnay, merlot, cabernet and syrah as well as indigenous Sicilian varieties such as nero d'avola (red) and grillo (white) grapes, all selling for a list price of $8 per bottle. Nero d'avola is easy on the American palate. It's hearty, fruity and dark red, something like a cross between syrah and zinfandel. Grillo, on the other hand, is a fresh white wine that's made without oak and tastes great with seafood. These local grapes fare best in Sicily, and they're the ones that have resonated with buyers and wine drinkers.

"That's what we sell the most of and that's what has seen the largest increase in sales," says Repola. "There are more and more wine lists featuring Sicilian wine and nero d'avola in particular. It seems like it has almost become mainstream; well, maybe it won't be mainstream until there's nero d'avola from Napa Valley."

Tradition and progress

From Feudo Arancio's vineyards this spring, I made my way with another writer to the Azienda Agricola COS in the Vittoria region near Ragusa in southern Sicily. The drive, in pouring rain, took hours. When we arrived at COS, a fire roared in the fireplace. But owner Giusto Occhipinti wasn't expecting us until the next day; we were crashing a wine-filled supper he was having with friends. Being Italian, he assumed we were hungry and immediately set to feeding us.

Besides being a gracious host, Occhipinti is one of the stars of the contemporary Sicilian wine scene. A trained architect, he is a traditionalist as a winemaker, but he also has modern aesthetic sensibilities. He makes great wine by keeping it simple, adding virtually nothing to his wines but patience and attention.

The house specialty is cerasuolo di Vittoria, an officially recognized wine style generally made by blending locally grown nero d'avola with a more delicate red grape called frappato. Cerasuolo is one of the few officially recognized blended red wines from Sicily, and the good ones are truly beautiful wines -- medium-bodied, fragrant, elegant and full of red fruit.

All COS wines are made naturally, unfiltered and with very little sulfur added. One COS wine, Pithos, is even fermented in Greek-style terra cotta amphorae, which is about as traditional as winemaking gets. COS also makes a couple of excellent straight nero d'avolas. As rustic as these wines may sound, they're also some of the best made in Sicily, proving that respect for tradition and excellence can go hand in hand.

Near COS, Occhipinti's niece, Arianna, is building a winery for her own label, Occhipinti. Without property of her own, the young, exceptionally focused Arianna forged partnerships with some of her elderly grape-growing neighbors with very old vineyards who had, for many years, sold their grapes to others. She works with them in the winery to produce first-rate local wines. In her mid-20s, Arianna already seems to know exactly what she wants to do with her life. Although her wines are not yet available in Minnesota, she is the sort of driven young winemaker who is bound to be become an important figure in Sicilian wine.

Etna: a world apart

Mount Etna is best known as Europe's largest active volcano, but the black slopes of this mountain are also home to some of Sicily's most historically important vineyards. The local grape is called nerello mascalese. It doesn't grow well anywhere else, but on the slopes of Mount Etna, it makes refined red wines that are, on one hand, completely atypical of southern Italy and, on the other hand, as essentially Sicilian as any.

At Mount Etna, I met up with Frank Cornelissen, a Belgian expatriate who has settled there. Like Occhipinti, Cornelissen ferments his wines in old-fashioned terra cotta amphorae and sells almost all of it in Japan through a partner wine merchant.

After giving me a tour of the area vineyards, Cornelissen delivered me to Marco De Grazia. De Grazia, an American, imports some of Italy's most exciting wines to the United States, where his name on the back label of a bottle is an assurance of quality for sommeliers and retail buyers. He imports wines from all over Italy, but when he decided to invest in a property of his own, he zeroed in on the quirky, remote vineyards of Etna.

On a cold, cloudy day, he was recovering from the flu and wearing a red beret that made him look a little like Marlon Brando as Col. Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now." He cooked cow tongue for lunch and recounted the history of the wines of Etna.

De Grazia explained that the region was historically one of the only areas that bottled most of its wine and sold it abroad, labeled as being from Etna. The wines' good reputation meant a better living for the growers of Etna, evidenced by the sizable old homes that dot these mountainside estates.

Etna is cooler and damper than the rest of Sicily. It's common for the harvest in Sicily to begin in August for most grapes and extend into September. When I called in late October to talk to De Grazia again, he couldn't hear the phone ring because he was destemming freshly picked grapes. "We harvest very late and get very tip-toeing wines that are reminiscent of Burgundies and nebbiolo, with northern [more elegant] flavors. Everyone who tastes these wines will say that it doesn't taste like a southern wine or a Sicilian wine, but [historically] it was the Sicilian wine," De Grazia said.

Maybe the wines of Etna haven't yet scaled the heights achieved by the best pinot noirs of Burgundy or the greatest nebbiolos of Barolo and Barbaresco, but they deserve to be compared, and only recently have the best and brightest come to this region. Great wines will be made on Etna, as long as the volcano cooperates.

Etna isn't prone to violent eruptions, but lava flows are regular occurrences. In the early 1980s, the town of Randazzo was nearly overrun. Vineyards have, from time to time, been immolated. "The volcano gives so much that if once in a while it takes something back, no one seems to really mind," De Grazia said.

For now, at least, the mountain is in a giving mood, and the future looks sunny for Sicilian wine.

Tim Teichgraeber is a San Francisco entertainment attorney and wine critic.