Summer Whites from Sicily

Sicily’s native grapes get spiffed up and step into the spotlight.

With 620 miles of coast, Sicily is awash in seafood. At morning fish markets, giant tunas hang from hooks ready to be sliced into thick steaks, and fishmongers bark at shoppers to inspect their morning’s catch, glistening on ice. At evening time, diners at seaside trattorie crowd around plastic tables and greedily tuck into spaghetti with clams while their kids pry open spiky sea urchins and spread the coral flesh onto sesame bread.

So you’d think there’d be an abundance of crisp white wines to accompany this maritime bounty, right? Wrong. That is, until recently.

Fifteen years ago, it didn’t matter where you went—seafood shack or elegant restaurant—the “bianco” side of the wine list was short and unappealing. Nothing spoils a nice fish dinner like a flabby, flavorless white, but Sicilians had long settled for these depressing wines, the product of a quantity-over-quality mentality that’s prevailed ever since the post-war recovery, when Sicily became a leader in bulk wine. I imagine the locals simply shrugged and said, “What’re ya gonna do? Sicily’s hot.” Over-ripe grapes and insipid whites were a fact of life.

Happily, the thinking has changed. What was once a trickle of quality whites has turned into a tsunami, first in the vineyards, then (hallelujah) in restaurants. Now U.S. wine shops are catching the wave. Better yet, the grapes in favor are native varieties, usurping the throne from chardonnay, the darling of the 1990s, even in Sicily. Here’s a primer to the island’s rising stars.

Catarratto

Catarrato, caricante, and zibibbo are now among Sicily’s star whites

Catarratto epitomizes the turnaround in quality. This old Sicilian variety, first documented in 1696, is a high-volume workhorse—perfect for bulk production. Concentrated around the western cities of Palermo, Agrigento, and Marsala, it accounts for a whopping 60 percent of Sicily’s plantings. When yields are high, it’s bland in flavor, which can be fine if you’re shipping it north to Piedmont’s vermouth houses or sweetening and oxidizing it for Marsala. But it’s not so fine if you’re making dry table wine. Catarratto is behind oceans of bulk plonk, and it’s even to blame for the more elevated but equally bland Alamo DOC.

So surprise, surprise: The first Sicilian white that knocked my socks off was a catarratto. It came from Alessandro di Camporeale, a family winery founded in 2000 by longtime grape growers near the dusty town of Camporeale. Called Benedè (the nickname of grandpa Benedetto Alessandro), it’s amazingly fresh, a perfect thirst-quencher on a hot Sicilian afternoon, with bright acidity, lovely citrus and stone-fruit aromas, and a good mineral finish to boot. 

How did they do it? Smarter farming, for one. That means planting at a higher, cooler elevations so the grapes don’t cook and diligent pruning. It also means spotlighting their 28-year-old vines, now brimming with character, and switching to a different biotype in newer vineyards, “which has great personality,” attests communications director Anna Alessandro. During crush and fermentation, steps are taken to preserve freshness and fragrance, then six months of aging on the fine lees (yeast) in stainless steel tanks adds intensity. 

Wines like Benedè prove that catarratto isn’t inherently hopeless, but can shine given the right TLC. Other bottles to look for: Cusumano’s Catarratto, Firriato’s Caeles Catarratto, Tenuta Rapitalà’s Vigna Casalj

Grillo

The first dry grillo

If there’s a star of this show, it’s grillo. Until the 1990s, this grape was wholly obscure, used exclusively for Marsala, and even then it played second fiddle to catarratto. No one dreamed of turning it into a dry wine—until Marco De Bartoli came along. This former race-car driver and iconoclast is known for overturning the Marsala industry’s bad habits (a whole other story). Placing his bets on grillo and taking white Burgundy as a model, De Bartoli created a full-bodied, barrel-aged version in 1990 called Grappoli del Grillo. To this day, it remains an exceptional wine in every sense: It’s utterly delicious. It’s age-worthy, gaining nuttiness with time. And it’s still one of the only grillos matured in oak.

It took another decade for wineries to follow suit. Everyone thought him nuts, and the wine was hard to market thanks to a linguistic coincidence: grillo also means ‘cricket’ in Italian. “Marco went all around Italy introducing this variety, but people stared and said, ‘What is he talking about?’,” says De Bartoli communications director Marilena Leta. “Today there are lots of grillos with a cricket on the label. But Marco said, ‘No way! I’m not going to present this like an insect.’ ” He called it Grappoli del Grillo, or bunches of grillo. “He wanted to let the world know that grillo was a grape variety and not a wordplay.”

Today grillos abound, but the prevailing style eschews oak and aims for easy drinking, highlighting the citrus or tropical fruit flavors. Grillo is often planted near the shore, where sea breezes cool the grapes and bolster acidity. That might explain the salty finish on some (trust me, that’s a good thing). I particularly like Tasca d’Almerita’s Grillo di Mozia, which marries zippy lime, white flowers, and a beguiling saline minerality. Its grapes come from Mozia, a speck of an island settled by the Phoenicians, which sits in a lagoon across from Marsala’s salt flats. Its bush-trained vines benefit from the same sea breezes that enable the production of sea salt. 

Long thought to be indigenous, grillo was confirmed to be a cross between catarratto and zibibbo (see below) a decade ago and its creator credited: Sicilian agronomist Antonino Mendola made this hybrid in 1874 “to create a more aromatic Marsala,” according to his notes. Two biotypes exist: one is fresh and bright, with some salinity; the other is rounder, higher in alcohol, with honeyed aromas. Clearly, a winery’s choice greatly effects its grillo style.

Other examples to try: Abbazia Santa Anastasia’s Grillo, Ceuso’s Scurati Bianco, Fondo Antico’s Grillo Parlante, Spadafora’s Grillo 

Marco De Bartoli, photo Giuseppe Gerbasi, courtesy Marco De Bartoli

Zibibbo

Both I and my shrimp scampi have De Bartoli to thank for pioneering dry zibibbo as well. Zibibbo is the local name for Moscato d’Alessandria, an ancient, heat-loving variety with plump, sweet grapes that are suitable both for eating and for wine. (Genetically it’s the same as Piedmont’s moscato.) Here again, we have a grape that toiled for centuries making sweet wines—most notably Passito di Pantelleria from the volcanic island lying between Sicily and Tunisia. Like the raisins that are a big industry on Pantelleria (the word zibibbo echoes zabib, Arabic for raisins), the passito grapes are dried in the scirocco wind, which concentrates their sugars and nectar-like flavors, so redolent of orange blossom, dried apricot, and candied orange peel.

De Bartoli’s family had a plot on Pantelleria, but these grapes had been sold for eating. As an agronomist, he saw potential in their impressive level of acidity, which led to his creation of a dry zibibbo using fresh grapes in 1989. Called Pietranera (in reference to the black volcanic rock), the wine comes from a single vineyard high on the terraced slopes, which now boasts 60-year-old vines. It’s wildly aromatic—a moscato family trait—and showswhite grapefruit, melon, and white pepper.

Other wineries were slow to pick up on this dry style. But in the past few years, more zibibbos have been seeping into the market. They all share the grape’s intense floral aromatics, which happen to go splendidly with many regional dishes. I still dream about a harbor-side dinner where Fina’s fragrant Taif Zibibbo accompanied a pistachio-encrusted fish fillet. 

Other zibibbos to try: Curatolo Arini’s Zibibbo, Donnafugata’s Lighea, Firriato’s Jasmin 

Planeta winemaker Patricia Toth in front of the 1614 lava flow

Carricante

In eastern Sicily, carricante is the one to watch. Many critics believe this grape offers the greatest potential for an age-worthy white, based what’s coming out of a new crop of boutique wineries on Mt. Etna. Once again we’re talking about a highly productive grape that was traditionally farmed in expansive vineyard tracts for bulk wine (as its name suggests; calico means laden). “Til 10, 15 years ago, there was no real premium-production wine on Etna,” observes Patricia Toth, enologist at Planeta, “so we’re very concentrated on learning what to do with this variety.”

 One thing’s for sure: Carricante’s most favorable sites lie on the volcano’s northern slopes. “Last century, there was a habit of planting whites on the south,” says Toth. “But they have a lot of sunshine, and sometimes I feel a lack of acidity. On the north side, there are bigger thermic exchanges, and that has a very good effect on the aromatics.”

When Planeta first planted on Etna in 2008, its aim was to add an ageable white to its portfolio. “We were searching for something indigenous to age,” says cofounder Francesca Planeta. The first property they bought lies at nearly 3,000 feet, not far from the snow line. (Snow can cover Etna’s peak from December to March.) What’s more, it has the kind of black volcanic soil that white wines adore. Beside one vineyard is an embankment that’s the terminus of a 1614 lava flow, legendary for having lasted 10 years. Toth points out the layers: a mix of lava powder and organic matter in the agricultural soil on top; then the original top soil from centuries ago; red stones oxidized by a previous lava flow; then a hard layer from hot liquid lava. “You see the roots found these cuts in the magma and came down,” she notes. No wonder Etna’s carricantes have such complexity, beautifully illustrated by Planeta’s Eruzione 1614 (with 10% riesling) and its Etna Bianco (a pure carricante partially fermented in barrique).

Asked to compare carricante with catarratto, Elena Graci of the up-and-coming Graci winery says, “With carricante, you feel the precision. It’s almost cutting. It gives the sensation of a mountain white, and there’s more sapidity. Catarratto is a bit softer, rounder.” When young, carricante has a citrus and savory herbal character, with tangy acidity and a salty mineral finish. When older, who knows? Most of Etna’s wineries are still so new they’re in the process of finding out.

Others examples to try: Benanti’s Pietramarina, I Vigneri di Salvo Foti’s Aurora Carricante, Graci’s Arcurìa Etna Bianco, Tenuta delle Terre Nere’s Etna Bianco

Published in the Summer 2019 issue of Tastes of Italia.