When Giuseppe Benanti first crafted wines from the foothills of Mount Etna in Sicily, he didn’t envision that one day, Etna wines would garner a stellar worldwide reputation. He aspired to simply emulate the best wines from Piedmont and Burgundy, using indigenous Etnean grapes.
“My father was experimenting at the time”, he continued, detailing how the senior Benanti hedged his bets in the 1980s by developing a portfolio of wines from Etnean and international grapes like chardonnay to appeal to a wider audience. His strategy was to open markets off the back of the hero international grapes and push Etna wines as an add-on.“Today, it seems like quite a crazy strategy, but we're judging with hindsight.
With vineyards on every slope of Mount Etna, Benanti is in prime position to comment on terroir differences exhibited on three winemaking slopes – the north, east, and south- and 133 single vineyards called contradas. “The North is cooler and rainier than the South, but the East slope is even rainier and quite humid. The South can be subdivided into South-East, quite Mediterranean, and Southwest, which shows elements of Continentality .
An increase in global demand has also translated into pressure to expand the Etna DOC boundaries to accommodate either the western slopes or higher altitudes. The western slopes are inhospitable to vines, said Salvino, however, there’s some give in the northern slopes: “Good wines from Nerello Mascalese are already being made at higher elevations in the Randazzo area, so we would simply be"ratifying" something which already exists.