Administrative area · Italy
Sicily
A large Mediterranean island whose modern reputation rests on high-altitude Etna wines and on Nero d’Avola.
About Sicily
Sicily produces a very large volume of wine, but the quality story of the last two decades has been Mount Etna, where vineyards climb to around 1,000 m on the volcano’s flanks. Nerello Mascalese grown at that height gives pale, high-acid reds — the altitude is doing most of that work, since it keeps the growing season cool enough for acidity to survive full ripening on an island at the latitude of Tunisia.
Etna Rosso is frequently compared to Burgundy and Barolo — again for structure and transparency rather than flavour.
Nero d’Avola, the island’s most planted red, ranges from soft commercial wine to something considerably more serious. Grillo and Catarratto make the principal whites, and Marsala is the historic fortified wine.
No authority delimits this name or attaches rules to it. A political unit — an Italian region, an English county, a US county — used as a wine area because that is how the industry and its readers talk about it, not because a wine authority delimited it. That does not make it less real or less useful — it means nothing legal follows from it, and you will not generally find it on a label as a controlled designation.
Grapes
Wines from here
red
Etna Rosso
Pale, high-acid, ashy red from vineyards on an active volcano — Sicily’s most un-Sicilian wine.
red
Nero d’Avola
Sicily’s most planted red: ripe dark fruit with better acidity than most southern Italian varieties manage.
red
Cerasuolo di Vittoria
Sicily’s only DOCG: a blend of Nero d’Avola and the floral, delicate Frappato, pale and perfumed.
fortified
Marsala
Sicily’s fortified wine, made in dry and sweet styles and badly served by its reputation as a cooking ingredient.
Climate
Everything from hot and arid in the west to genuinely cool at altitude on Etna, where vineyards reach a thousand metres.
These are influences on how a wine turns out, not determinants of it. Picking date, yield, vine age and every winemaking decision sit between the climate and the glass.
Soil and geology
Volcanic black sand and lava on Etna; limestone, clay and sand elsewhere. The contrast is the reason Etna behaves like a different country.
WineHQ describes soil in terms of what it demonstrably does — drainage, heat retention, water supply, rooting depth — and not in terms of flavours it is said to transmit. Vines take up ions, not aromas, and no mechanism has been demonstrated by which a mineral in the ground is tasted in the glass. See soil and drainage.
Places within it
What to eat, and how to serve it
Derived from this region’s signature styles. Each is listed separately, because a region does not have one serving temperature.
Sources
Sources consulted
- Italian DOP and IGP wine register — Ministero dell’agricoltura, della sovranità alimentare e delle foreste (MASAF)
- eAmbrosia — the EU geographical indications register — European Commission