Tenuta delle Terre Nere Etna Rosso Prephylloxera La Vigna di Don Peppino 2023

The Land

Phylloxera reached Etna in 1881 and took nearly everything. Inside a four-hectare block of Calderara Sottana, directly across from the Terre Nere cellar in the commune of Randazzo, two small parcels survived. The vines there are over 140 years old, still on their own roots, and cover 0.8 hectares in total. This is the north face of the volcano at 600 to 650 meters, the coolest and latest-ripening side, where soils are volcanic pumice mixed with basalt and traces of ash: black, porous, free-draining, and hostile enough that yields stay under five tons per hectare without anyone having to work at it. Ungrafted, pre-phylloxera Nerello Mascalese on the north slope of an active volcano is about as narrow a set of conditions as fine wine gets.

The Wine

100% Nerello Mascalese from ungrafted vines, north-exposed, with annual production of roughly 4,000 bottles. The wine is pale, translucent, and structurally closer to Burgundy or Barolo than to anything else from southern Italy: violet, rose petal, sour cherry, wild strawberry, blood orange, licorice root, and crushed volcanic rock, with fine, chalky tannin and a long saline finish. 2023 was punishing on Etna. Persistent rain through the critical part of the growing season brought heavy downy mildew pressure, and the year demanded constant vineyard work and hard selection. Marco de Grazia rarely recommends decanting anything. He makes an exception for this bottling, which is slower to open than the standard Calderara and repays the extra air.

The People

Marco de Grazia spent years as one of Italy's most influential wine exporters before founding Tenuta delle Terre Nere on Etna's northern slope, and he brought a Burgundian frame of reference with him: single contrade treated as crus, vine age tracked parcel by parcel, minimal extraction, restrained oak. In 2006 he realized the two ungrafted parcels inside Calderara Sottana were something separate and began vinifying them apart from the rest of the vineyard. That decision is essentially what established contrada bottling on Etna as a serious practice rather than a curiosity, and the estate has mapped and separated its holdings that way ever since.

Food Pairing

This is a wine for savory food in moderate portions, not for anything that will bury it. Roast rabbit with herbs and olives, pasta alla Norma with fried eggplant and ricotta salata, grilled swordfish with salmoriglio, or aged pecorino with honey. The chalky tannin and high acidity handle olive oil, tomato, and salt without needing red meat, and the volcanic salinity meets seafood in a way most reds cannot. Decant it an hour before you eat.