Bella-Colonna

De Grazia is a large part of the reason anybody outside Sicily drinks Etna wine at all. He came to the volcano looking for growers, bought a vineyard on that first trip, and made his first wine at Tenuta delle Terre Nere in 2002. On the back label of those first bottles he called Etna 'the Burgundy of the Mediterranean', which sounded like a stretch at the time and does not now. Terre Nere grew to around 45 hectares in 30 separate plots across nine contrade, between 600 and 1,000 metres up. From 2005, sitting on the board of the Etna DOC consorzio, he led the campaign to have the mountain's historic contrade recognised in law. There are 133 of them in the appellation now, and almost every new Etna estate puts one on its label. That is largely his doing.

The northern slope is where the Burgundy comparison comes from. Randazzo sits high on the north side of the appellation, harvest here is among the latest in Europe, and the gap between day and night temperatures in summer is large. The soils are lava flows laid one on top of another over the life of the volcano, so they change from plot to plot rather than from village to village. Nerello Mascalese is the red grape and Carricante the white. Phylloxera reached Etna in 1881, but the silica in the volcanic soil saved a good deal of what was there, which is why very old ungrafted vines still turn up on the mountain.

Bella Colonna works with both grapes. Some of the fruit comes from Contrada Pignatuni above Randazzo, at around 650 metres, where the bush vines are fifty to a hundred years old and are cropped very low, so there is very little wine to go round. These are not easy wines and they are not meant to be. If Etna is new to you, I am always happy to talk you through them.