The road round Etna is longer than the map suggests. From Randazzo on the north slope to Viagrande on the south-east it is 55 kilometres and a good hour and a quarter. I made the drive on a clear afternoon in late October, and when I turned in at the Benanti gate at the foot of Monte Serra the summit behind me wore a white thread of steam and the light was going gold. This is the quieter side of Etna, in eastern Sicily, Italy: closer to the sea than the north, and home to the estate the trade treats as the classic Etna reference.
Antonio and Salvino Benanti were both in the courtyard when I arrived. They are twins, born in 1974, and they have run the estate together since the end of 2012. I had met them once before at a tasting and spent the evening unsure which of them I was talking to. This time I paid attention.
Giuseppe Benanti and the Etna Project#
The property is 19th-century family land at Viagrande on the flank of Monte Serra, a spent cone on the lower mountain. In 1988 Giuseppe Benanti, the brothers’ father, who had made his career in pharmaceuticals, decided to revive the family vines and to find out what the mountain could do. The Etna DOC had existed since 1968, the first in Sicily, but almost nobody was asking what its different slopes did to the wine.
He asked. The study he set up, the Etna Project, took parcels from different slopes, flows and altitudes, made them separately and compared them over years. The first Pietra Marina, a Carricante from old vines at Milo, was the 1988 vintage. His phrase for it, and the estate’s motto, is “Quality gives value to life”, which sounds like a slogan until you have tasted the wines.
I came to Benanti through a glass rather than a gate. A friend in Vienna opened a Pietra Marina with ten years on it; it smelled of lemon peel and cold smoke and tasted like nothing else in Italy. Until then I had kept Etna in the red column. That bottle moved Carricante to the top of my white one.
Four slopes of one volcano#
About 35 hectares are spread over four slopes, and the spread is the point. On the east, at Milo in Contrada Rinazzo, the vines face the Ionian Sea and take the weather; Milo is the wettest village on the mountain and the home of Carricante, and the old Pietra Marina vines stand at about 950 metres. On the north, in Contrada Dafara Galluzzo near Rovittello, part of Castiglione di Sicilia, is Nerello Mascalese country, cooler and later. The south-east is here at Viagrande, Contrada Monte Serra; the fourth slope is the south-west, at Santa Maria di Licodia.
Each slope sits on a lava flow of a different age, and the soil is whatever that flow has become: black sand, lapilli, the loose gravel the growers call ripiddu.
Antonio walked me up through the Monte Serra vines as the shadows lengthened: alberello, bush vines on chestnut stakes, on terraces walled with lava stone that held the day’s heat. A cat was asleep on one and did not move for us. Nerello is among the last grapes picked in Italy, and a few late bunches were still hanging.
Steel, oak and sixty months#
The cellar is classic and says so. The whites ferment and age in steel, so that Carricante’s acidity and salt are left as the mountain made them. The reds go into oak. The Riservas are held 60 months before release, a long wait on a mountain where most wines reach the market young.
Two rules of the appellation matter here. Etna Bianco Superiore may only come from Milo and must be at least 80 per cent Carricante; Pietra Marina is its reference. Etna Rosso must be at least 80 per cent Nerello Mascalese, the rest usually Nerello Cappuccio, the darker, softer grape that gives colour and flesh. Benanti also bottles Nerello Cappuccio alone, which is rare and useful: it shows guests what the blending grape contributes before they taste the Rosso.
There is no manifesto about yeasts or sulfur here, and no apology for that: a classic estate in the plain sense, on a mountain that also has some of Italy’s most talked-about natural growers. I pour both on the same day, and Benanti is a large part of why I pour both.
“Carricante does not need us to add anything,” Salvino said in the steel room. “It needs us to leave it alone and then to wait. The waiting is the difficult part.”
One glass: Pietra Marina 2019#
We tasted in a room off the courtyard with the door open and the mountain in it.
Then the two Riservas side by side, same grape, same age, two slopes. Rovittello, from the north, was darker and firmer on the gums: sour cherry, ash, tannin that will need the rest of the decade. Serra della Contessa, from the old alberello on Monte Serra, was more perfumed and finer-grained, orange peel and dried rose.
The table at Viagrande#
Benanti receives visitors every day except Monday, by reservation, and Viagrande is where its hospitality lives. We ate late, in the village. Pasta alla Norma first, the Catania dish of fried aubergine, tomato and grated ricotta salata, with the Pietra Marina, whose acidity cuts the oil the way lemon would. Then Etna salsiccia with porcini from the mountain and the Rovittello, the north slope’s own pairing. Bronte pistachio in the dessert, and a lemon granita to finish.
We talked about the 1988 harvest, about how long a Carricante can go, and about the palmenti, the lava-stone press houses of the mountain. Antonio is precise with technical questions and patient with impatient ones. I had both kinds.
Benanti on tour#
On my Etna wine tour we sleep on the north slope, in Randazzo or Linguaglossa, and take Viagrande as an afternoon, arriving as the light goes, with five or six wines and Pietra Marina and the two Riservas side by side. Guests who have done my Piedmont tour recognise the shape of Nerello Mascalese at once, pale colour and real tannin, and make the Nebbiolo comparison before I can; it is half right, which is the interesting half. Those who come from the Friuli orange-wine route get the opposite lesson from Pietra Marina: a white with no skin contact, no oak and hardly any colour that still tastes of one place.
Bring a layer for the cellar and shoes you do not mind filling with black sand. We do the drive by minibus; the Italian limit is 0.5 grams per litre, and the Riservas are not made for spitting.
I drove back round the mountain in the dark with a bottle of Pietra Marina on the passenger seat and a faint red glow on the summit above the north slope. I already knew I would not open it for ten years, and that I would spend most of them thinking about it.
