Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 25
Nuanced
Nero d'Avola
by Stephanie Johnson
Nero d'Avola has always struck me as Italy's version of malbec: bold and fruity,
but a bit monolithic. Yet during a recent dinner in Palermo, I tasted a nero
d'Avola that kept me coming back to the glass. Feudo Montoni's Nero d'Avola
Lagnusa was fresh and floral, with high-toned red fruit flavors and snappy acidity that reminded me more of a young cru Beaujolais than of my jammy nero
d'Avola stereotype.
Lagnusa's flavor profile began to make sense a few
days later, as I stood shivering in gusty winds at
nearly 2,000 feet above sea level, looking out over
Feudo Montoni's vineyards in west-central Sicily.
Fabio Sireci refers to his estate as an "island within an
island," a splash of green vines amid a sea of golden
grain fields where summer temperatures can drop
as much as 40 degrees in the evenings. Lagnusa is
Sireci's "entry-level" nero d'Avola, a moniker that
feels utterly inadequate given the wine's complexity
and sheer deliciousness. Vrucara is his top-tier nero
d'Avola, culled from vines 80 to 100 years old that
deliver a deep, nuanced wine with a similarly cool
core of acidity.
Heading about 80 miles west from Feudo Montoni to a coastal plain near Menfi, I found another
intriguing expression of nero d'Avola at Cantine Barbera. Marilena Barbera's organically farmed nero
d'Avola vines grow a few hundred feet from Sicily's
southwestern coast, where gentle sea breezes and
limestone-laden soils yield a softer, saline-inflected
wine. Barbera ferments the destemmed grapes for
just one week and ages the juice in stainless steel for
six months, giving full expression to the wine's warm,
herbal strawberry flavors. It's a multidimensional
wine that speaks strongly of a place.
Sicily is a continent, or so its inhabitants claim of
its diverse growing regions, and nero d'Avola turns
out to be highly adept at expressing the island's terroir differences. It accounts for about 16 percent of
all plantings, by far the most of any red variety, and
appears in nearly every part of the island except the
northeast, where nerello mascalese prevails on Mt.
Etna's volcanic slopes. For years the variety functioned as a workhorse grape, appearing in blends
or bolstering northern Europe's more anemic reds.
Duca di Salaparuta was the first producer to bottle and market a varietal nero d'Avola, in the early
1980s, and others soon followed, as vignerons like
Fabio Sireci and his father, Elio, at Feudo Montoni
were recognizing the variety's potential to produce
serious wines.
Vito Catania, proprietor of the Gulfi winery in Sicily's southeastern zone of Vittoria, has been a champion of the variety since the mid-1990s. After building a successful chemical company, Catania returned
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018
Contents
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - Cover1
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - Cover2
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 1
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 2
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 3
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - Contents
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 5
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 6
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 7
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 8
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 9
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 10
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 11
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 12
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 13
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 14
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 15
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 16
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 17
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 18
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 19
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 20
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 21
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 22
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 23
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 24
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 25
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 26
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 27
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 28
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 29
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 30
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 31
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Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 70
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 71
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - 72
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - Cover3
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2018 - Cover4
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