Bella-Colonna

Bella Colonna is Marco de Grazia's range of single-vineyard wines from the northern slope of Mount Etna, and it takes its name from one of the plots he kept for himself.

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, which the Italian agriculture ministry approved in 2012. There are 133 of them in the appellation now, 81 of those on the north side, and almost every new Etna estate puts one on its label. That is largely his doing.

Our supplier tells us that in 2025 he sold a stake in Terre Nere but held on to a selection of prime parcels around the Calderara Sottana contrada outside Randazzo, and that these are the vineyards behind Bella Colonna. I have not been able to confirm that anywhere else. What I can say is that Terre Nere's own published range contains no Bella Colonna and no Pignatuni wine, which is consistent with this being a separate venture rather than a Terre Nere label. Treat the ownership story as his importer's account rather than something we have checked.

The northern slope is where the Burgundy comparison comes from. Randazzo is the northernmost point of the appellation, harvest here is among the latest in Europe, and the gap between day and night temperatures in summer can reach thirty degrees. 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.

The Etna Bianco is Carricante. The Etna Rosso is Nerello Mascalese and the one to start with if you have never drunk Etna. The Etna Rosso Pignatuni is the step up, from a single hectare of fifty to hundred-year-old bush vines in Contrada Pignatuni above Randazzo at around 650 metres, cropped at roughly three tonnes to the hectare. That is a very small amount of wine.

These are not cheap bottles and they are not meant to be easy ones. They are among the most interesting things I sell, and if Etna is new to you I would rather talk you through them than have you guess.