Terrazze dell'Etna

Terrazze dell'Etna is at Contrada Bocca d'Orzo, in the commune of Randazzo, on the upper slopes of Mount Etna in north-eastern Sicily. The Bevilacqua family founded it in 2008, and the founding was as much a restoration project as a planting one: the old rural terraces, the dry stone walls and the ancient palmento, the lava-built press house where Etna wine was made for centuries, all had to be brought back before anything could be bottled. The estate now runs to around forty hectares and eleven different wines, and it sits inside the Etna Natural Park. Etna itself was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2013.

The reason Etna makes the wine it does is altitude and air. Cold air pours down from the summit at night and the mountain throws its own shadow across the vineyards, so the growing season stretches long into autumn even at a Sicilian latitude. The soil is not soil in the ordinary sense: it is the crumbled remains of old lava flows, black, porous, mineral-rich and low in organic matter. Vines have to work for what they get, and the wines that come off it are pale, high in acid, firmly tannic and savoury, which is why Etna Rosso gets compared to Burgundy or Barolo more often than to the rest of Sicily.

The estate is worked by hand. The terraces are pruned and tied by hand by local crews; at the end of winter sheep are put through to graze the grass between the vines before the teams hoe the ground the flocks have softened. Terrazze dell'Etna farm several separate contrade, each of which contributes something different. Bocca d'Orzo runs from 650 up to 950 metres and gives the spiciest aromatics. Statella sits at 650 metres on rockier ground and gives the most persistent structure. Calderara and Allegracore are both at 500 metres and give the most fragrant wines. The vines are trained in the traditional Etnean head-trained bush, at densities of seven and a half to eight thousand plants per hectare, and yields are low by any standard.

The range runs well beyond red wine. There is a white, a rosato, a Pinot Nero, and a set of traditional-method sparkling wines including a Cuvée Brut and a Rosé Brut with fifty months on lees, which is a serious amount of ageing for a Sicilian sparkling wine.

Carusu is the Etna Rosso blend, 80% Nerello Mascalese with 20% Nerello Cappuccio from thirty-year-old vines at 600 metres, and it is the sensible way into the estate. Cirneco is the serious one: pure Nerello Mascalese from vines over sixty years old, some of them pre-phylloxera survivors, cropped at half a kilo per plant and given two years in barrel. That vine age is the thing to hold on to. Etna is one of the few places in Europe where ungrafted, pre-phylloxera vines are still in production, because the volcanic sand the louse cannot live in.