Natalie MacLean 00:00:00 How can vines for wine thrive in Mount Aetna’s rocky volcanic soils on the island of Sicily? Mount Etna is a perpetual baby in terms of its vineyard soils, constant rejuvenation of the soil through ash and lava impacts the vines health and the resulting grape characteristics. The lava flows are centuries old and vary widely, so how would a producer choose one flow over another for planting? And how does Mount Etna still have pre phylloxera vines that are more than 200 years old? In today’s episode, you’ll hear the stories and tips that answer those questions in part two of our chat with Ben Spencer, the award winning author of The New Wines of Mount Etna. You don’t need to have listened to part one from last week first, but if you missed it, go back and have a listen after you finish this one. By the end of our conversation, you’ll also discover why Fabio Constantino of Terra Constantino Winery is such a fascinating figure in Aetna’s wine community. What makes the landscape of Mount Etna unique and beautiful? How Etna wines compare with volcanic wines from other regions, whether field blends of different grape varieties are still common in Aetna’s vineyards.

Natalie MacLean 00:01:20 How Norelco Marseillaise compares to Pinot noir. Winery cappuccino is mostly used in blends rather than as a single varietal wine. How Charente Aetna’s signature white grape develops kerosene or petrol aromas often found in aged Riesling, and how you can get the most out of your trip to Mount Etna.

Natalie MacLean 00:01:49 Do you have a thirst to learn about wine? Do you love stories about wonderfully obsessive people, hauntingly beautiful places, and amusingly awkward social situations. Well, that’s the blend here on the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. I’m your host, Natalie MacLean, and each week I share with you unfiltered conversations with celebrities in the wine world, as well as confessions from my own tipsy journey as I write my third book on this subject. I’m so glad you’re here. Now pass me that bottle, please, and let’s get started.

Natalie MacLean 00:02:31 Welcome to episode 353. So last week I shared some memories of my trip to Sicily many years ago. So I’ll share a few more from chapter five of my second book, unquenchable A Tipsy Search for the World’s Best Bargain Bottles.

Natalie MacLean 00:02:45 The chapter is entitled Vino under the Volcano. Since the 1980s, the market for low end wines has been drying up. The only way Sicilian producers could survive was to improve quality, and frankly, there was plenty of room for improvement. Unfortunately, even today, Sicily’s best known wine is also its worst regarded Marsala, a fortified dessert wine. Historically, it was hard to swallow with its oxidized, burnt flavors. In 1773, when British merchant John Woodhouse, stranded on Sicily for several days during a storm, tasted the wine at a local tavern, he realized that it would keep on a long sea journey if it were fortified with brandy. Marsala eventually replaced port as the British sailors drink of choice. Nelson’s navy drank it up, and Woodhouse retired a rich and groggily happy man. Marsala is unfairly tagged as plonk. The wine has the potential to be a divine after dinner drink, a fact foreseen perhaps by the Arabs, who originally named the town Marsa el Allah, meaning Port of God. It’s a mystical, watery world between land and sea on the island’s western shore, where the setting sun plays off the salt flats, sending shafts of red and purple light up through the clouds like sherry.

Natalie MacLean 00:04:07 Marcella uses the solera method of aging. Wine from the current vintage goes into the barrel first, and is gradually siphoned from one barrel to another. Year after year, wine from the last barrel is drawn off to be consumed, and that barrel is then topped up with wine from the second oldest. This fractional blending preserves the flavor signature of the wine over the years because in theory, a little wine from that first vintage and from all other since then is in every bottle. However, in the 1940s, Marcella fell from grace, no longer suiting the taste of the times. Shoddy winemaking, such as adding egg yolks, almonds and other unmentionable ingredients hastened its demise. This syrupy wine was relegated to cooking sauces, no longer considered a digestive like port or brandy. Soon most Sicilian wines were described as marmalade. They were so jammy overripe. Hardly surprising when temperatures in Sicily can sort of 46°C or 115°F during the harvest. Even though Sicilian winemaking has improved considerably over the past decade, Marcellas former image still sticks to it.

Natalie MacLean 00:05:22 Poorly made wines are like a crime ridden neighborhood, tarnishing the reputation of the entire city. However, Marsala is worth trying. It’s graded according to color, sugar, alcoholic strength, and length of aging. The best types are Virginie, five years aging, and Vecchio ten years. Some of the most reputable producers today include Florio, De Bortoli, Martinez and Lombardo. One of my favorite Italian authors, Giuseppe Thomas di Lampedusa, whose brilliant novel The Leopard chronicled the decline of the 19th century aristocracy in Sicily. The author could have been describing the local wine industry when he observed, quote, if things are to stay as they are, then something has to change. End quote. The setting of his book is now a winery called Dona Fuga, meaning fugitive woman. It was named for Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, who fled to the estate when Napoleon’s army invaded her city at the end of the 18th century. My favorite wine from Donna Fogarty also has a romantic, windswept name’s Milly e una. Not 1001 nights.

Natalie MacLean 00:06:37 When the market for Marsala collapsed in the 1960s, the local government created winemaking cooperatives that bought 80% of the harvest, mostly from small farmers. These co-ops still exist. The largest set solely is now the size of an oil refinery, capable of crushing more than 110 million tons of grapes. The company occupies much of the village of Menifee on the western shore. Employs more than 20,000 people and owns more than 5% of the island’s vineyards. By the late 1980s, the market for bulk wine started to tank as well. Europe had become a wine lake, producing much more than it could drink or distill into spirits such as vermouth, or even turn into ethanol for automobiles. Government subsidies dried up, and the big co-ops had to change their strategy. One of the most prescient executives was Diego Planeta, president of Sicily, who started the drive to improve quality with the help of Indologist Giacomo Tatis, who had just retired from the respected Super Tuscan winery, Saskia Diego planted experimental vineyards with a wide variety of grapes to determine which best suited Sicily’s climate and soils.

Natalie MacLean 00:07:57 The winner, Nero Davila, the black Nero grape from the town of Avila in eastern Sicily. Apart from small plantings in Calabria on the toe of the mainland, it’s only grown in Sicily today. Nero Davila produces a wine packed with distinctive flavor, reminding me of the quirky Italian actor Roberto Benigni in the movie Life is Beautiful. This inky wine with a tight wire streak of acidity is as plush and quotable as Merlot, but it also has the darker, peppered violet character of Syrah. It shares the chameleon nature of Tuscany Sangiovese grape, which makes Chianti such a round, generous wine but becomes austere and structured in Brunello de Moschino. It’s the perfect complement to our Thursday night pasta meals. Even within Sicily, the style of Nero d’Avila varies according to climate and soil. It can be spicy and taut, like a Rhone Syrah in limestone soils near Noto, or fleshy and fruity like Australian Shiraz in the clay soils near Memphis. The thin skinned, late ripening grape is susceptible to rot like Merlot, and so it thrives in Sicily’s hot, dry climate.

Natalie MacLean 00:09:15 The island is on the same latitude of Tunis, North Africa, and gets an average of 130 days of sunshine every year. A hot, stinging, sand laden wind called the sirocco often blows north across the Mediterranean from the Sahara Desert, sometimes reaching hurricane speeds of 80 miles an hour. It ripples on the horizon, whips up dust clouds, burns off excess moisture. The few raindrops that fall on Sicily acquire a sandy coating before even reaching the earth. Working a mediterranean vineyard means tending a scorched garden under an apocalyptic sun until the sun sets, that is, of evenings on the Sicilian coastline. Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia marquez wrote that the sea on windless nights reflects the beams of African lighthouses, while on the bottom of the sea lies the sleeping wine amphora. When it comes to winemaking, Nero Davila is best when yields are kept low to focus the vines nutrients in fewer grapes, which produces more concentrated flavors. It likes a slow, temperature controlled maceration and fermentation to extract more flavor, color, and tannin compounds from the grape seeds and skins.

Natalie MacLean 00:10:34 These compounds give its structure, balance, and the ability to age. It also has the ability to blend. Nero Davila is a grape swinger, mating easily with Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah and the local grape. Frito on its own are blended. It’s a wine with a robust love of flavor that’s not heavy, making it an excellent house wine. It’s charm on the cheap. Like most Italian wines, Nero d’Avila has a vibrant acidity that makes it taste fresh and clean. This helps it to pair well with the savory profusion of Sicilian food. The island’s rustic cuisine is complemented by the flavors of many cultures capers, olives, garlic, peppers, mint, fennel, almonds, raisins, citrus and dried herbs. The Arabs introduced spices mint, fennel, saffron, eggplant, almonds, lemons, limes, oranges, raisins, capers, pine nuts, anchovies, pasta, pastries, and couscous, which they adapted to make a dish based on fish rather than lamb. The Greeks made Maid. Honey, olive oil and wine.

Natalie MacLean 00:11:41 The Romans grew wheat, vines and beans. The Normans brought salt cod. The Spanish made rich tomato sauces. The food and wine here speak of history, terrain, identity and people. You can devour Sicily’s history on your plate and in your class. All right. Well, I hope that gives you a thirst. Perhaps to read or listen to the rest of the book. I’m also reviewing lots of Sicilian wines on Instagram at Natalie MacLean wine, and of course on my website. I’ll post links to this book and my others in the show notes at Natalie MacLean. 353 okay, on with the show. You’ve mentioned some of the characters and people who shape Aetna’s Weinstein. Share with us maybe one particular person character who stands out because they’re colorful or emblematic of Aetna’s Weinstein, or however you want to pick that person.

Ben Spencer 00:12:47 There’s a lot of people. I think of a friend. His name is Fabio Costantino. He and his family owned Terra Costantino. His family bought their property near Villa Grande in Contrada Blandino in the 70s.

Ben Spencer 00:13:03 The property had an old vine vineyard on it. It had been reorganized during a period of rural flight, when the EU was giving subsidies to farmers to make farming easier, so the old vineyard that was usually 10,000 vines per hectare was reduced to maybe 8000 vines per hectare. To make it easy for them to run a tractor through. But it was a family home. And so he grew up running through these fields and seeing the black grapes growing next to the white grapes and the Butterflies fluttering through the grasses and the olive trees growing next to the pear trees and the cherries, and then the history. They have an old palmetto on the property, and in 2015, when they decided to build a new winery, they excavated part of the vineyard and cut into the hillside. And in that process they revealed 60,000 years of that lasagna, the stratification of Etna, which he very joyously left some of these openings so you could see that, but also to humidifier the cellar naturally to keep the cellar cooler naturally. And I was just there a few days ago with some wine students.

Ben Spencer 00:14:27 You can see in his eyes the excitement that he probably had as a kid, just explaining why he left the walls exposed to the under part of Etna, and where you can see the spongy lava where it burned the earth. And you have a layer of terracotta and what that rock meant and oh, look, there’s a root coming down through the soil. Can you see the root? So to see somebody who’s grown up in it, who does the work, who’s done an exceptional job in making wine, so excited about what’s happening on Etna and so excited about his family farm is exceptional.

Natalie MacLean 00:15:07 His roots run deep as well.

Ben Spencer 00:15:09 Yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:15:10 So I love your description of Mount Etna. You describe it as a steaming, malformed pyramid in a mountain transfixed by evolution. You want to say more about that?

Ben Spencer 00:15:22 It really is exactly that. If you sit back, especially in the afternoon, and look at the hillside as the sun beats down, maybe at an angle. In the golden hour, you can see the ferocity of the mountain.

Ben Spencer 00:15:41 You can see the benevolence of the mountain. I can see how fertile the soils and sands are. We can see the wild Scotch broom. We call Ginastera here, breaking up the rock and lava flows that are a few hundred years old. Well, the black earth of the 1981 lava flow is still very lunar. Even beyond that, soft, wispy wheat and the breeze, the golden wheat eating up from the 1647 lava flow with just right next to the forest. But all of it, it coming in at different angles and the shadows and how the light plays on it. It does come from this ferocious place that where we live, the magma chamber below us. but it’s incredibly beautiful. And I think if we’re able to allow ourselves to relax and look at it, we can see just how. Maybe the hard stuff is also quite beautiful and beneficial.

Natalie MacLean 00:16:45 Very poetic. I can see your roots now. We’ve already talked about this, but I still love the description, so I’m going to say it anyway.

Natalie MacLean 00:16:52 Mount Etna is a perpetual baby in terms of its vineyard soils, constant rejuvenation of the soil through ash and lava impacts the vines health. You know, the resulting grape characteristics. The lava flows are centuries old and vary widely. So how would a producer maybe choose one flow over another for planting?

Ben Spencer 00:17:12 Everybody has their preferences. Sometimes it’s a simple budgetary decision or a farming decision whether to take over an old vine vineyard or to buy something and replant new vines, whether you want to face the contours of the mountain, or if you want to ease into it with a tractor or some sort of mechanized labor. Not that many producers do much more than use a tractor in the vineyard. It’s very difficult to use heavy machinery on it, and everybody harvests by hand. But certain contrada, certain lava flows, the age of the soil, the slope east, north, south. They have different flavors, they have different spices. And it’s all that lasagna vacation of the mountain. It has its own style. Sometimes producers are born into a particular contrada and they assume control of their family farm.

Ben Spencer 00:18:17 But when investing apart from that, when purchasing or leasing land, you typically find wineries going for flavor over quantity, but quantity will still be part of the consideration. So I think it’s a mix.

Natalie MacLean 00:18:33 Yeah. Now when I think of volcanic soil that’s hardened, I think of this black rock. Are people actually drilling down and planting vines in there? Or seedlings? I mean, can anything grow in that? It just seems like, I don’t know, like lunar, as you described it.

Ben Spencer 00:18:50 Yeah. Etna has an amazing amount of fertility. It’s very sandy. It’s very rocky. So you don’t think that there’s much that can grow, but it’s very, very fertile. You can plant just about anything here. We have citrus, we have kiwi, we have cherries, olives, nuts, you name it. The vines are only part of that biodiversity with the actual farming of the soil, with the farming of the land. You can just put a stake or put a grafted vine selection masala, a cutting from your vineyard into the earth and try to grow it.

Ben Spencer 00:19:28 What it taps into will sort of define what that vine will be with most vineyards today, what we’re seeing is some excavation to make the subsoil a little bit softer, all the nutrients more easily accessible to the roots. We’re seeing a lot of excavators. We’re seeing a lot of sifting of stones and boulders from the landscape and being piled up into towers or used for terracing and things like that. So that’s a primary step. But getting into the vineyard, I myself planted a vineyard last year by hand after excavating, and you just have to literally punch a hole in the ground with a stake and twist those vines right in into the soil. You pack them down and you hope for the best. Nothing is irrigated on Etna. You can irrigate the baby vines for a year or two to get them started, but most producers prefer not to. So you’re literally just twisting the vines into the soil and crossing your fingers. And most of the time we see 95% of the vines take maybe in most cases, even more than that, because the soil is so fertile.

Ben Spencer 00:20:44 And if you’re planting early enough, when when there’s rain. February and March, for example, you’re getting just enough water to the root tips for them to keep going down into the soil.

Natalie MacLean 00:20:54 Wow. And how would you compare Etna Wines with other volcanic wines like from Santorini and Greece, the Canary Islands or even Washington state?

Ben Spencer 00:21:04 Etna soil is very lively. It’s younger in most cases because Etna is continuing to spew out sand and the volcano itself. Strangely enough, there’s this wonderful video that I used in some of my lectures from the European Space Agency and NASA that over the course of ten years they looked at Etna as the magma chamber breathes and evacuates lava. And so you do see some sedimentation, some gravitational erosion and things like that. And so what we’re seeing on Aetna is, I think, a little bit younger, vibrant soils in many of these other regions. You do see a lot of black sand a lot of rock. It’s accessible but it’s also been eroded. So there’s the vibrancy, there’s the mineral aspect, there’s the tension that we feel in the wines.

Ben Spencer 00:21:58 But I think you’re just getting a little bit more of that now. You’re getting a little bit more of that spice that’s coming from the iron and the soil as well, and the fresh silica. So I think vibrancy, freshness, also because of the elevation, the acidity in Aetna’s wines, because we’re at 410,000m above sea level. And so we do see some subtle variations within these lines with respect to the other regions like Santorini or Washington or even Northern Italy.

Natalie MacLean 00:22:29 Interesting. How high can vines be planted? Like are the highest vines like in Mendoza, Argentina? Just thinking of context or perspective, how high up is 1000ft above sea level?

Ben Spencer 00:22:42 Yeah. Mendoza I think is probably taking the cake on that one. The vines on Etna, the highest I’ve seen is about 1370 metres. So those are some very old vines that have been established for a long time. They’re up in the forest and intermixed. You have probably 17 different varieties in this one vineyard. It’s pretty fantastic. So we’ll probably see even higher elevation vineyards planted over the next generation as climate change begins to affect, especially this latitude.

Ben Spencer 00:23:17 We’re at 37.5 north, so The things are warm here. Things get very warm. Subtropical at the sea level. To alpine at the top of the mountain. So we’re able to be a little bit more flexible with that with respect to the growing. But yeah, the vines can be planted pretty high. They’re very, very hardy creatures. It must.

Natalie MacLean 00:23:36 Be. It must be like the people who live there. So you’ve mentioned mixes of different grapes growing together. These sort of field blends, are they still common or is viticulture moving toward, you know, just vineyards of.

Ben Spencer 00:23:52 The old vine? Vineyards have this spiced approach to their vineyards. This is a Tuscan and even like Benedictine Franciscan approach to wine growing, adding biodiversity to the vineyards, but also because of the fermentation process on Etna, which was in gravity operated. Palminteri. So these stone vats that move down from one level to the other. You see very fast hot fermentations and three days, six days where all the esters are evacuated from the tanks.

Ben Spencer 00:24:30 So historically, it was better to have one grape variety for aroma or to black and white grape varieties. Again, growing side by side. Another one for bulk. Another one for tannin. Another one for color. But now we’re seeing a lot more monoculture in the vineyards. We’re seeing single rootstocks being grafted to single or maybe two different clones of Narula Moscheles or Chiara Conti. So this is a new future for Etna that the mountain hasn’t quite seen yet. We’re eager to see what’s going to happen with that. But the old vine vineyards are probably the most exciting still, because everybody has this little spicing in their own vineyard, whether it’s a couple vines of Esperia or Madama Bianca, or even a vine called. Terrible. Literally terrible. Not because of how it tastes, but because how hard it is. Even Grenache noir on the northwest slope. So everybody has it has an old vine vineyard, has a little bit of spice in their wines. You see it a lot in the white wines, especially with like Manila and Gracanica and things like that.

Ben Spencer 00:25:42 And in the continent and Bianco wines, the monoculture is really the way things are moving forward.

Natalie MacLean 00:25:48 Right, right, right. And you’ve called noir marseillaise, Aetna’s Pinot noir. What parallels do you see between those two grapes?

Ben Spencer 00:25:56 It’s very interesting to see how Naholo communicates the soil type. Also the elevation of a specific vineyard. It tells you a lot in the glass, whether it’s the age of the soil, the mineral content, the amount of iron in the soil. Whether it’s from the east slope or from the north or even the south, you can maybe tell just subtle variations in the tannins and the fruit. As we mentioned before, with the elevation. More ripeness, more bold fruit, more dark colors from lower elevations. Generally speaking, of course, there’s these subtleties that, again, are very, very worthy of discovering.

Natalie MacLean 00:26:42 So it’s that translation of terroir that is similar between the two grapes and is thin skinned like Pinot noir and fussy and high maintenance.

Ben Spencer 00:26:53 It actually, that’s more than Barolo cappuccino, honestly, which is sort of the backup singer for Etna Rosso blends.

Ben Spencer 00:27:02 Narellan has is sort of medium late ripening grape variety with thicker skins, some tannins, great acidity, but very pale coloring. Generally, it comes from as far as we know, with the DNA typing that’s been done so far. It’s a crossing between Sangiovese and Montana Bianco, which was historically used in the southern part of the Italian peninsula for making raisin wines. So there’s this element of potential sweetness, but this sturdy, hearty skin that can resist ash can resist sun, can resist certain elevations. So it does respond very well to Etna. And again, very much like Pinot noir communicates where it’s grown.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:53 Lovely. And you’ve mentioned Rolo. Is it? Cappuccino was the one you just mentioned as the backup singer.

Ben Spencer 00:27:57 Carpaccio.

Natalie MacLean 00:27:58 Carpaccio. Oh, cappuccino. I don’t know.

Ben Spencer 00:28:01 It’s very similar.

Natalie MacLean 00:28:03 Okay. Watching too many TikTok memes or something. So it’s mostly in blends, but rarely seen solo. Is there a reason why it hasn’t had its chance in the spotlight.

Ben Spencer 00:28:14 Well, there are, I believe, 6 or 7 producers on Aetna making Norelco carpaccio in purity.

Ben Spencer 00:28:21 And some of them are doing a really great job. It is a darker variety. Most likely it has some ties to Spain. At some point we’re not really sure. But when the authors of the Aetna doc wrote the rules and regulations and recipes for these Aetna wines in 1968, what they found in the vineyard was primarily 80% in the realm with a 20% of narrow capture. So this became the standard recipe for Aetna doc Reds and also Aetna Doc Rosato. It made it possible for the producers 20 years after World War two, when nobody was really living in the on the mountain to make a wine that had some valor to it without doing much or changing much. And so that’s what they found, and that’s what they stuck with. And currently that’s the recipe. But we see increasing quantities of neuromuscular as in blends, lesser and lesser Norelco cappuccino. But it’s a really good thing to discover for students, for wine lovers which blend they like the best or which percentage they like the best. And I think the cappuccino adds a little bit of color it serves softens the tannins of an Etna rosso.

Ben Spencer 00:29:48 It fleshes out the fruit a little bit, and it gives the wine a little bit more stability over the long term. And so we do see some benefits from it. And on its own it’s it’s fantastic for everything from sushi to. So it makes for an amazing holiday wine or a party wine where you have a number of dishes and you just want one read Naruto is worth finding.

Natalie MacLean 00:30:10 That’s quite versatile. And now you also mentioned Keira Conti as the signature white grape. It can develop a chemical compound that creates that sort of kerosene or petrol aroma, often found in age Riesling. What’s happening there? Why does it develop that? Is it just sunlight exposure or how does it get that?

Ben Spencer 00:30:30 In Germany, it’s considered a flaw. I’ve heard a lot of producers. I was talking to one of my guests recently and he said, nobody wants to hear you say that in a tasting in Germany.

Natalie MacLean 00:30:42 Noted, I like it. I’ll even compare it to like outboard motor. It’s like in the summertime. And it’s like, yeah, no, no, don’t say it.

Ben Spencer 00:30:51 Yeah, but, I’m Etna, like in Germany because we’re at elevation, because their latitude is so high up in northern Europe, we see very similar Intensities of light and very similar requirements for ripening, and so producers will remove leaves around the fruiting zone to encourage ripening and in both regions and in both grapes. What we’re finding is that if the fruit zone is left with leaves around it for between 60 to 90 days after fruit set, the grapes won’t get sun to the point where that compound TDN as we call it for short, it won’t get fixed into the skins and you won’t get that after some bottle aging. So producers are learning about this here on Etna, and the best wines are maybe showing an accent of that and in warm vintages, but generally it’s a commonality that’s issued.

Natalie MacLean 00:32:03 Okay, We won’t talk of it anymore.

Ben Spencer 00:32:06 I love it too. I really do. In just a small note, after maybe 3 to 5 years in bottle, it’s great.

Natalie MacLean 00:32:12 Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Now, what’s the oldest vine you’ve seen on the mountain?

Ben Spencer 00:32:17 I remember seeing several old vines.

Ben Spencer 00:32:20 I don’t necessarily know their exact age, but we can pretty confidently say that we’ve got vines that are pre phylloxera, that are unrooted, that were planted before 1879 when phylloxera hit Sicily and really took over, especially where there’s clay. But on Etna we don’t have a lot of clay. And so we do have these very, very old vines.

Natalie MacLean 00:32:45 So the phylloxera root louse that devastated Europe and California couldn’t survive in Netanya soils.

Ben Spencer 00:32:52 Right. It’s too sandy. The soils need about 3% clay to incubate phylloxera over the winter. And so the soil isn’t old enough to have that much clay in it. And there’s also the snow up in elevation, so it’s just inhospitable to the louse. But the oldest vines that I’ve seen are probably, strangely enough, either nearby Moscheles or possibly Minella. People call it like the snacking grape. It’s a table grape and a wine grape. It shows up in white wines, typically the vanilla bianca, but the trunks can get really, really big. They can get really long.

Ben Spencer 00:33:33 They look like they’re prehistoric. Some of them are probably 200 years old. I would wager. The oldest vines are probably up to 220 250 years old or so.

Natalie MacLean 00:33:45 Oh, it is incredible. Oh my goodness. And so if people want to travel to Etna, what would be your top two tips to get the most out of a visit to the mountain?

Ben Spencer 00:33:55 We’re seeing a lot of people coming to Etna for a number of reasons. Wine is just one of them. there’s a ton of very nice hotels. They’re creating a destination kind of feeling for the place. There’s scuba diving, there’s mountain climbing. There’s spelunking in the caves on Etna. There’s obviously the volcano excursions, there’s sailing.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:19 There’s wine school.

Ben Spencer 00:34:21 Yeah, the wine school, of course, at the wine school. But there’s also an enormous amount of great food and wine. And that part of the culture is really important. You can’t do all the things around here and not eat right.

Natalie MacLean 00:34:33 And what would be your favorite wine and food pairing? I know it’s hard to choose, but like, what would be the wine and what would be the iconic food from it?

Ben Spencer 00:34:41 Yeah, I would say it’s pretty easily the what grows together goes together.

Ben Spencer 00:34:46 So on the East Slope, we’re seeing a lot of fish and white wines from Charente on the north slope. We’re seeing a lot of red wines and rosés Is paired with the local myall or wild boar, and it’s sort of a crossing of Iberico ham and wild boar, but with cheeses and pastas and things like that. For my money right now. I really, really love. I’m really excited about the Etna Beaumont category. So this is classically made. So champagne method sparkling wines made from neuromuscular, but also now Cara Conti. Some of these wines are aging on their lees in bottle for up to ten years. And these are really invigorating wines on the palate. They’re exciting. They’re to taste with cheeses, with fish, with meats, with the local frittata. You can have them from breakfast through lunch and dinner. I think those are also wines worth checking out to.

Natalie MacLean 00:35:57 That sounds great. And if you could share a bottle of wine with anyone living or dead outside the wine industry, who would that be?

Ben Spencer 00:36:05 Oh, well, I think I mean, the first thing that comes to mind, and I think I’d probably have a bottle with my dad.

Ben Spencer 00:36:10 We lost him in 2018. It’d be nice to just sit down and have a chat with him again. But there’s a lot of people that I think would be great to sit down with and enjoy a glass of wine with. But from this industry in particular, we’ve lost a few great producers over the last few years. Giuseppe Benante, who was the founder of Benanti, Andrea Franchetti, who founded possibly Charo. Silvia maestro. She founded Judy Fasano. There’s a lot of people here. I think that would agree with me that those few and others would be great to sit down and have a glass or a few bottles with.

Natalie MacLean 00:36:52 I mean, the time has flown, but is there anything we haven’t covered them that you would like to mention before we wrap up.

Ben Spencer 00:36:59 I mean, our wine tasting for me, but I think inviting people to come here is a good thing and, just explore, enjoy this place for all of its variety in a single location, but also getting people to enjoy the Sicilian lifestyle, which is a little slower, more deliberate and, family driven.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:26 That sounds lovely.

Ben Spencer 00:37:27 Yeah.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:28 Absolutely lovely. I know we didn’t get to the wine tasting, but do you have a bottle there that you wanted to hold up?

Ben Spencer 00:37:34 Sure, yeah. Speaking of Giuseppe Benanti.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:38 I have. Okay.

Ben Spencer 00:37:39 The Benanti.

Natalie MacLean 00:37:41 Oh, okay. There we go. We could put a link in the show notes.

Ben Spencer 00:37:44 Sarah, this is the 2022 vintage. Very warm vintage. And this is a single vineyard Actually mid slope of a one of the 319 extinct lateral craters, or pox, that sort of have sprouted up around the cone of Etna. And this is a neuromuscular. It’s a beautifully ruby colored wine. The perfumes are just billowing out of the glass. I can smell it from here. Just red fruit and savory herb. And it’s a wonderful combination of all Borelli. So head trained vines and also vines trained in unilateral cordon. And it’s one of my favorite local single vineyard wines.

Natalie MacLean 00:38:39 At Borelli is when they’re just sort of like tree trunks sort of curling onto themselves, like they’re not on any trellises.

Natalie MacLean 00:38:46 Or is that correct?

Ben Spencer 00:38:47 Yeah. Yeah, it’s it’s a head trained vine in goblet or what we would imagine with three prongs. Okay, so a trunk and then trained up a chestnut steak, which is tradition here on Etna, typically planted one metre apart from one another so laborers can work without bumping into the other vines, but also so the vines get 360 degrees of sunlight and bees can pollinate very easily. And, traditionally they’re grown in quincunx, which is more or less the same form of the stars in the American flag. That repeating pattern of five here on Etna, it’s a little bit modified, but if you’re standing at one corner of the vineyard, you can see the entire vineyard depending on whichever direction you look. So it’s a great way to monitor your vines, and it’s great for concentration of flavor, for ease of farming. That works really well for on irrigated vines like we have on it.

Natalie MacLean 00:39:52 Lovely. Wow. Well, I’m sure we all need to go to the mountain soon after this conversation.

Natalie MacLean 00:39:59 It just sounds magical. Oh, the wines, the place, the food, the light, everything. Ben, thank you so much for for sharing these stories with us. And congratulations on this book. Urge everyone to get it. The new wines of Mount Etna. Just go buy it. So I will say goodbye for now, Ben. But thank you so much. Really. Pleasure talking with you.

Ben Spencer 00:40:22 Thank you. It’s been a great time.

Natalie MacLean 00:40:24 Okay. Cheers.

Ben Spencer 00:40:25 Cheers.

Natalie MacLean 00:40:31 Well, there you have it. I hope you enjoyed our chat with Ben. Here are my takeaways. Number one, how can vines for wine thrive in Mount Etna? Rocky volcanic soils on the island of Sicily. As Ben explains, it’s very sandy and rocky, so you don’t think that much can grow, but it’s actually very fertile. You can plant just about anything. He says. They have citrus, kiwi, cherries, olives, nuts. The vines are only part of that biodiversity. You can even put a grafted vine selection called a marsala, a cutting from your own vineyard into the earth.

Natalie MacLean 00:41:06 What it taps into will define what that vine and the wines become. Nothing is irrigated on Etna, so you’re just twisting those vines into the soil and crossing your fingers. And yet 95% of the vines take because the soil is so fertile. Number two, Mount Etna is a perpetual baby in terms of its vineyard soils, constant rejuvenation of soil through ash and lava, and the resulting grape characteristics. So how would a producer choose one lava flow over another for planting? Then explains that of course everyone has their preferences. Sometimes it’s a simple budgetary decision or a farming decision whether to take over an old vine vineyard or to buy something new and replant vines. Whether you want to face the contours of the mountain or ease into it with a tractor or mechanized labor. Though not many producers use a tractor in the vineyard because it’s very difficult to use heavy machinery, so most harvest by hand. But certain contrada, certain lava flows, the age of the soil, the slope, they all have different flavors, different spices.

Natalie MacLean 00:42:13 And it’s that lasagna soil layering the mountain. Each has its own style. And number three, how does Mount Etna still have pre phylloxera vines that are more than 200 years old? As Ben explains, these vines were planted before 1879 when flocks were hit Sicily and really took over, especially where there’s clay. But on Etna they don’t have a lot of clay, so they have these really old vines. Soils need about 3% of clay to incubate the phylloxera root louse over the winter, so the soil isn’t old enough to have that much clay in it. There’s also snow up at the higher elevations, which is also just as inhospitable. But the oldest vines that he’s seen are either Narellan, Moscheles, or possibly Manila. The trunks are really big and long. They almost look prehistoric, Ben said. I love that description. In the show notes, you’ll find a full transcript of my conversation with Ben. Links to his website. Books and wine. School. The video versions of these conversations on Facebook and YouTube live, and where you can order my book online now no matter where you live.

Natalie MacLean 00:43:26 If you missed episode 183, go back and take a listen. I chat about Italian wines and wine competitions with Vine Italy’s Stevie King. I’ll share a short clip with you now to whet your appetite.

Stevie Kim 00:43:41 Italian wine is just like the Italians. They’re incredibly creative and imaginative. It’s not by chance that they excel in cuisine, in fashion and design.

Natalie MacLean 00:43:53 Gucci. Versace. Cars.

Stevie Kim 00:43:55 Yeah, they’re completely individualistic and fragmented.

Natalie MacLean 00:44:00 Is that a history of kingdoms?

Stevie Kim 00:44:02 I don’t know. But Italians are incredibly individualistic, so that means that you have so many denominations in so many different groups. So we’re talking about 600 odd grapes and 400 plus denominations.

Natalie MacLean 00:44:19 Denominations meaning little regions or designations within regions.

Stevie Kim 00:44:23 Yes, yes. So that is very difficult to wrap your head around when you are a wine lover. And that’s one of the reasons we’ve been making small booklets to make it a little bit more digestible and approachable.

Natalie MacLean 00:44:43 You won’t want to miss next week when we chat with two feet. Niedermeyer a medical doctor with a PhD in surgery.

Natalie MacLean 00:44:50 He’s also the author of the new book Winds of Brazil, part of the classic wine library of the Academy. Devin, if you liked this episode or learned even one thing from it, please email or tell a friend about the podcast this week. Especially someone you know who be interested in learning more about volcanic wines. It’s easy to find the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast. Just tell them to search for Natalie MacLean Wine on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, their favorite podcast app, or they can listen to the show on my website at Natalie MacLean. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this episode, or if you’ve read my book or are listening to it. Email me at Natalie at Natalie MacLean dot com. In the show notes, you’ll find a link to take a free wine and food pairing class with me called the five Wine and food pairing Mistakes that can Ruin your Dinner and how to fix Them forever at Natalie MacLean. And of course, that’s all in the show notes at Natalie MacLean. Three. Five. Three.

Natalie MacLean 00:45:53 Thank you for taking the time to join me here. I hope something great is in your glass this week. Perhaps a wine that entices you to visit Mount Etna.

Natalie MacLean 00:46:10 You don’t want to miss one juicy episode of this podcast, especially the secret full bodied bonus episodes that I don’t announce on social media. So subscribe for free now at Natalie MacLean. Meet me here next week. Cheers!