Curatolo Arini

Curatolo Arini is in Marsala, on the western tip of Sicily in the province of Trapani, and it has been there since 1875, when Vito Curatolo built a cellar in the middle of his own vineyards. The company name is his surname joined to his mother's, Arini. Five generations later the family is still in charge: Sergio Curatolo is president, his cousin Roberto sits on the board, Roberto's son Riccardo is general manager and Sergio's daughter Alexandra runs marketing and the visitor side. Antonino Reina has been the winemaker for over a decade. The house does not claim to be the oldest Marsala producer, because it is not; Woodhouse and Florio came earlier. What it claims, accurately, is to be the oldest Marsala producer still run by the founder's family, and that is a meaningful difference in a denomination where most of the historic names have long since been sold on.

Marsala exists because of a storm. In 1773 a Liverpool merchant, John Woodhouse, was forced into the harbour, tasted the local Perpetuum, and shipped it home with brandy added to survive the voyage. It became the Royal Navy's wine and Nelson's, and then in the twentieth century it became the cheap brown stuff in the back of the cupboard. That collapse in reputation is the reason a genuinely good Marsala now costs less than it should.

If you have arrived here from a recipe, here is the short answer. Both bottles below will work in the pan. For chicken or veal Marsala, and for anything savoury with mushrooms and cream, use the dry Riserva. For zabaglione, tiramisu, or a sauce you want a little sweetness in, use the Dolce. Neither is a cooking wine in the supermarket sense: cooking Marsala is usually salted so it can be sold outside the drinks aisle, and it tastes of it. Use one of these and you can drink the rest of the bottle, which is rather the point. Because it is fortified to 18%, an open bottle will keep for weeks in a cool cupboard rather than going over in two days.

How they make it. The Marsalas are built only from white grapes grown in the coastal districts of Triglia Scaletta and Spagnola, on the red earth just outside the town, mostly trellised with some old bush-trained plots still worked at low yields. Grillo makes up a high proportion, picked at the end of September when its thick skins have loaded up with sugar. The base wine comes in at 15 to 16% alcohol before any spirit is added, and Curatolo Arini then add only a small amount of wine alcohol to reach the legal minimum, so what you taste is concentrated wine rather than concentrated spirit. The concia, the sweetening and colouring stage, uses mosto cotto they cook themselves over a wood fire. Ageing is in Slavonian oak casks, tonneaux and French and American barriques.

They are not only a Marsala house. Since the 1990s, working with the Tuscan oenologist Alberto Antonini, they have built a Monovarietale range of dry Sicilian wines: Catarratto, Grillo, Inzolia, Zibibbo, Nero d'Avola and Syrah, largely from hillside vineyards inland at Contrada Chirchiaro, between Salemi and Vita at 500 metres, where the day-to-night temperature swing keeps the whites fresh.

The Marsalas run from a Superiore Dolce aged five years to a Superiore Riserva aged ten. Look at the labels, incidentally. They were commissioned in 1880 from the studio of Ernesto Basile, the leading architect of Sicilian Liberty, and the house has never replaced them.