Emanuele Scammacca del Murgo

The Scammacca del Murgo family have been on Mount Etna since 1860, when Senator Luigi Gravina made them a gift of around thirty hectares of vineyard on the volcano's eastern flank. That land is now Tenuta San Michele, at Santa Venerina in the province of Catania, and it is still the heart of the business.

For a long time it was farmland rather than a wine estate in the modern sense. That changed with Baron Emanuele Scammacca del Murgo, who took the view that Etna's volcanic soils and mountain microclimate were capable of far more than anyone was then asking of them, and set about converting the property into a serious winery. In 1981 they bottled and hand-labelled the first Murgo bottle, an Etna Rosso from the 1980 vintage. His sons run the estate today: Michele, a trained oenologist, looks after production, Pietro handles direction and the creative side, and Matteo runs Tenuta Gelso Bianco and the olive oil alongside the finances.

The family's other claim is one worth knowing. In 1980 Michele made a traditional-method sparkling wine from Nerello Mascalese, the first person on Etna to do it. The first Murgo Brut was released in 1990 after three years on the lees, and it is still the label they are best known for at home. Sparkling Etna is now a small category in its own right; they started it.

Tenuta San Michele sits at 500 metres, high enough that the vines feel the volcano and the Ionian Sea at the same time. That is the whole argument for Etna as a wine region. Big daily swings between afternoon warmth and night-time cold hold on to acidity and aromatics, and the soils are dark, mineral-rich volcanic sand and lava rather than the limestone and clay of most of Italy. Etna wines consequently taste nothing like the rest of Sicily. Where the island's plains give weight and sunshine, the mountain gives lift, salinity and a certain nervous energy, and does it at moderate alcohol levels that are increasingly hard to find further south.

The grapes are the mountain's own. Nerello Mascalese leads the reds, with a little Nerello Cappuccio for flesh and colour, and it behaves more like Nebbiolo or Pinot Noir than like anything Sicilian: pale, perfumed, savoury and firm rather than dark and sweet. Carricante leads the whites, blended here with Catarratto, and it is one of the more distinctive white varieties in Italy, high in acidity with a citrus and white-flower profile.

The estate now farms sixty hectares of vines across three properties, twenty-five of them at San Michele and mostly given over to Etna DOC, along with sixty hectares of olives and citrus. Total production is around 350,000 bottles. They are an organic farm in conversion and have written their own sustainability protocol on top of the organic rules: animal fertilisers only, reduced pesticide use even where a product is permitted, renewable electricity, and recyclable packaging.

The two Etna DOC wines, the Bianco and the Rosso, are the interesting part of the price list, because Etna has become fashionable and a lot of what fashion touches has doubled in price. These have not. If you have never drunk anything from the volcano, take one of each and drink them a week apart.