When a would-be winegrower comes to Salvo Foti, Sicily’s top wine consultant, for tips on starting a vineyard, he begins with a warning: To make good wine you have to be in it for the long haul.
Sicilian wine is in a peculiar spot. Historically, it has been made for local consumption or exported in bulk to give more delicate French and Italian wines a needed bit of backbone.
Despite centuries of winemaking, bottling and selling it for export has only begun in earnest in the last 25 years. Once Sicilian wine began hitting shelves around the world, there was something of a mini-boom, with Nero d’Avola, a grape indigenous to southern Sicily and worthy of a careful tasting, leading the charge.
Earning and keeping an IGT label forces growers to meet strict standards, usually resulting in a better wine, so the jump suggests some growers understand that quality, rather than quantity, is key to success.
A 2000 Nerojbleo – the entry-level wine at the Gulfi winery, where he consults – retails for about €14 but stands up to competition costing more than twice that amount.
Unfortunately, most of the Sicilian wine on retailers’ shelves is a much more recent vintage.
In the hill towns north of Mount Etna, Sicily’s wine boom is unfurling – but quietly. At Mr Foti’s Etna vineyard, part of an association with other local wine experts called I Vigneri, vines are grown like a bush.
It’s a wonderfully wild approach, inconceivable in most other wine-growing regions in the world.
Quince, cactus and fruit trees dot the vineyard. Between the vines, lizards flit around through the tall grass, fennel and mint, stray zucchini and chard plants. Occasionally, parsley springs from the crook of a vine and when a vine dies, it’s replaced by a new one, leaving old and new next to each other.
At Mr Foti’s vineyard, the harvesting is done by hand since there is no way to get anything more mechanised than a mule into most of the plots. Mr Foti is confident that if other Sicilian winemakers follow his lead, they’ll all be better off in the long run.