WINE: In Italy, sweet wines are achieving new depths of taste and elegance in a niche market that is expanding, writes Kate Singleton.
Vinitaly, the major wine fair in Verona, Italy, draws professionals and enthusiasts from across the globe, and always offers a number of delectable surprises. This year, oenophiles will rejoice to discover that sweet wines are finally emerging from a period of ignominy. In Italy, they are achieving new depths of taste and elegance in a niche market that is expanding. Increasing numbers of fine restaurants now offer a selection of sweet wines to accompany dessert.
"To match a wine with a dessert is harder than you might think," says Roberto Rossi, who has sought out some memorable examples for Silene, the gourmet restaurant he runs near Seggiano in southern Tuscany. "Good dessert wines are highly distinctive, like mature, complex individuals who are demanding in the company they keep." Some of the finest wines perceived as "sweet" create a perfect match with mature cheeses; others marry well with chocolate, a notoriously difficult partner. Indeed, the potential of such wines is best expressed by the Italian epithet "vino da meditazione," with its suggestion of leisurely, thoughtful drink to be enjoyed with friends.
The finest sweet wines are made by concentrating the sugar in grapes, which is most easily achieved in hot climates by drying mature grapes, either on the vine or after picking. There are also some superb "wines for meditation" whose complex aromas and longevity are due to the addition of select grape spirit, or gradual blending with small batches of wines of older vintages. Hot sun and dry winds make Italy's islands ideal producers of some of the world's most seductive sweet wines - Sicily, notably, but also its neighbours: Pantelleria, near the coast of Tunisia, and Salina in the Aeolian archipelago, to the northeast.
The time-honoured Sicilian dessert wine that is finally re-emerging after years of oenological ill-repute is Marsala. Though Marsala-laced creams, cooking liqueurs and similar execrable concoctions still exist, there are now enough quality producers to restore due dignity to the wine produced near the western seaport of Mars-al-Allah, the Harbour of God, as it was named by its ninth-century Saracen rulers. Foremost among these is Marco De Bartoli (www.marcodebartoli.com). As a producer, Bartoli has chosen to dissociate himself from the very term Marsala, preferring to call his superb traditional vino liquoroso Vecchio Samperi, after his estate of the same name. Made with the local Grillo grape variety, it is fortified for more than 20 years in oak with the Solera method of fractional blending of younger with more mature barrel batches. With rich aromas of raisins and almond paste, and persistent notes of spice, the Vecchio Samperi Ventennale is a wine that does make you think, and smile.
For all its history, Marsala is a relatively recent wine compared with the legendary Moscato di Siracusa, which dates to the Greek colonisation of southeast Sicily in the eighth century BC. Archestrato, the Sicilian writer of the fourth century BC, who described in detail many of the island's culinary traditions, deemed the white Muscat wine of Syracuse to be particularly good because it did not lose its fragrance as it aged. Widely appreciated throughout the Western world during the 1800s, by the mid-1900s production of Moscato di Siracusa was on the wane, dropping to an all-time low of around 4,000 litres a year in 1999.
Today, its future looks more promising, largely thanks to Antonino (Nino) Pupillo (www.solacium.it), whose estates occupy a swathe of land off the Ionian Sea. His luscious Solacium Moscato di Siracusa is made from Muscat grapes that are over-ripened on the vine. The Pollio Moscato is made with grapes that are only lightly withered on the vine before being crushed, so the wine is less sweet and well-suited to mature cheeses.
A note of optimism now also surrounds the long-neglected Muscat wine once made to great acclaim around Noto, southwest of Syracuse. Its rescue from oblivion is due to the Planeta winery (www.planeta.it), which is harvesting the grapes in its vineyards outside Noto, before they are fully ripe. The wine thus conserves the desired acidity with which to balance the fragrance.
On the wind-ravaged island of Pantelleria, meanwhile, any vegetation not protected by walls must grow close to the ground. The Zibibbo (or Muscat of Alexandria) vines are grown in hollows dug into the mineral-rich volcanic soils, yielding the large white grapes from which the Moscato and Passito wines are made. In early August, about half the crop is picked and dried in the sun for three weeks or so. The bunches are turned by hand each day to ensure even exsiccation. The other grapes remain on the vines until September, when they are picked semi-dried, pressed and fermented. At this point the raisins produced from the sun-dried grapes are left to macerate in this wine for three months. The aim is to imbue it with intense aromas of spice and apricot. Ageing in wood then precedes bottling. Marco De Bartoli's Bukkuram Passito captures the quintessence of Pantelleria, where nature excels and daisies look like dahlias.
Salina is also a volcanic island, but breezy rather than windy. Here it takes just eight to 12 days to dry out the smaller, more straggly Malvasia grapes grown in tiny vineyards laboriously cut from the sheer hillside. Outstanding among the handful of producers on the island is the Barone di Villagrande winery (www.villagrande.it). Its Malvasia delle Lipari Passito is a gloriously rich, warm golden dessert wine. "To make this Passito is truly a labour of love," says the biologist turned winemaker Maria Nicolosi. "I look after those grapes as though they were defenceless infants, protecting them from the dew and rushing to cover them in the case of a freak September shower. We also protract temperature-controlled fermentation for as long as two months in order to concentrate all the aromatic particles that give the wine depth and structure."
In this sense, sweet wines can capture a landscape more eloquently than their table wine equivalents. They owe less to the alchemy of the wine technician and more to the bounty of nature.
- New York Times Syndication Service. Mary Dowey is on leave.
A FEW ITALIAN WINE STOCKISTS: Sheridan's Cheesemongers, 11 South Anne St, Dublin 2, 7 Pembroke Lane, Ballsbridge, 14-15 Churchyard St, Galway; Cabot & Co, IFSC, Dublin; On the Grapevine, Dalkey, Co Dublin; Michael's Wines, Mount Merrion, Dublin; Cana Wines, Mullingar; Karwigs Wine Warehouse, Carrigaline, Co Cork; Dunne & Crescenzi, South Frederick Street, Dublin 2 and Enoteca, Bloom's Lane, Dublin 1.