Sicilian Wine: History of Marsala, Mount Etna & Nero d’Avola

Sicilian wine is at once the oldest and the newest thing in Italian wine. The Greeks were making wine on this Mediterranean island nearly three thousand years ago, and for most of the twentieth century it was Europe’s great wine factory, shipping oceans of cheap bulk wine north to be blended away. Then, in a single generation, Sicily reinvented itself — rediscovering its native grapes and the electric wines of Mount Etna to become the most exciting frontier in Italian wine. This is the full story of Sicilian wine, from Julius Caesar’s favourite bottle to the volcano.

The oldest wine island

Wine has been made in Sicily for the better part of three thousand years. Greek colonists arrived from the eighth century BCE and found the island perfectly suited to the vine, and under Greek and then Roman rule Sicilian wine became famous across the ancient Mediterranean. Its most prized bottle was Mamertino, from the north-east near Messina — reputedly the favourite wine of Julius Caesar, who is said to have served it at the banquets celebrating his triumphs. Long before Tuscany or Piedmont had a name for wine, Sicily was already a byword for it.¹

Marsala: Nelson’s wine and Garibaldi’s landing

Sicily’s most historic wine was, oddly, made famous by the English. In 1773 a Liverpool merchant named John Woodhouse, sheltering from a storm in the port of Marsala, tasted the local fortified wine and realised it could rival Madeira and sherry on the British market. He began shipping it in quantity, fortifying it with extra spirit to survive the voyage, and Marsala became a commercial sensation. Admiral Nelson himself ordered it for the Royal Navy after 1798, and it became known as “Nelson’s wine.” Marsala even had a hand in Italian history: in 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Thousand chose Marsala as their landing point to begin the conquest that would unify Italy — sailing, fittingly, into a harbour full of British wine ships.²

Garibaldi began the unification of Italy by landing at Marsala — a Sicilian wine town made famous by the English.

Europe’s wine factory — and the turnaround

For most of the twentieth century, Sicily made more wine than almost anywhere in Italy — but very little of it was bottled with pride. The island was Europe’s “wine lake”: vast co-operatives churned out cheap, strong, anonymous wine that was shipped north in tankers to add colour and alcohol to blends from cooler regions, or distilled away entirely. The change, when it came, was swift and total. From the 1980s and ’90s a wave of quality-minded producers — Tasca d’Almerita at Regaleali, Planeta, COS, Donnafugata and others — proved that Sicily’s sunshine and native grapes could make world-class wine. In barely two decades the island went from a byword for bulk to one of the most admired wine regions in Italy.³

Nero d’Avola and the Sicilian palette

At the heart of the revival is Nero d’Avola, Sicily’s great native red — deep, warm and juicy, full of black cherry and spice, and grown all across the island. It found its most refined expression in the south-east, where it is blended with the lighter, fragrant Frappato to make Cerasuolo di Vittoria, Sicily’s only DOCG. The whites are just as distinctive: crisp, saline Grillo (the grape behind the best Marsala, now also making fine dry wine), along with Catarratto and Inzolia. It is a palette of grapes found almost nowhere else — the reason Sicilian wine tastes so unmistakably of its own island.⁴

Mount Etna: the Burgundy of Sicily

No corner of Sicily has caused more excitement than the slopes of Mount Etna, Europe’s largest active volcano. Here, on terraces of black volcanic soil at high altitude, the Nerello Mascalese grape makes pale, perfumed, mineral reds so elegant and site-specific that they are routinely called “the Burgundy of Sicily.” Etna has old, ungrafted vines that survived phylloxera in the sandy volcanic soil, and a mosaic of named contrade — single districts treated like crus. Though Etna was made a DOC as early as 1968, its transformation into one of Italy’s most fashionable regions came only in the 2000s, as growers from Sicily and beyond rushed to bottle the wine of the volcano. Fittingly, its white grape, Carricante, makes an age-worthy white with a whiff of struck flint — wine, quite literally, born of fire.⁵

Pantelleria and the sweet wines

Sicily also makes some of Italy’s greatest sweet wines. On the wind-blasted island of Pantelleria, closer to Africa than to Europe, the Zibibbo grape (a form of Muscat) is dried in the sun and made into Passito di Pantelleria, an amber nectar of apricot and honey. The vines there are grown in a unique low, cupped, bush-trained style to survive the fierce wind — a technique so remarkable that UNESCO recognised it in 2014 as part of humanity’s intangible cultural heritage, the first agricultural practice ever so honoured.⁶

The Arab centuries: how the vine survived Islam

For more than two hundred years — from the ninth century to the Norman conquest of 1091 — Sicily was a Muslim emirate, and by the letter of the faith its new rulers had little use for wine. Yet the vine did not vanish. The Arabs brought with them an agricultural revolution — irrigation channels, terracing, citrus, sugar cane, and a genius for dry-land farming — and they found a way for the grape to earn its keep without ever seeing a wine press. The answer was the raisin.

Sicily’s most romantic white grape still carries the proof in its name. Zibibbo, the aromatic Muscat of Alexandria that gives Pantelleria its golden sweet wines, comes straight from the Arabic zabib, meaning “dried grape” or raisin.² Because the variety was prized as a raisin as much as for wine, it slipped through the centuries of Muslim rule when other wine grapes might have been torn out. When Christian Sicily returned, the vineyards the Arabs had tended were still there — a quiet inheritance hidden inside a single grape’s name.

The men who woke the volcano

Etna’s modern renaissance did not happen by accident; it was the work of a handful of stubborn believers. The estate of Benanti, near Viagrande, kept bottling serious Etna wine through the lean decades of the late twentieth century, proving the mountain could still make something fine when almost no one was watching. Then, around the turn of the millennium, outsiders arrived. The Tuscan wine-maker Andrea Franchetti planted high on the northern slope at Passopisciaro and, in 2008, founded the Contrade dell’Etna tasting — the annual gathering that first put the volcano’s single-vineyard contrade in front of the world’s press and effectively announced Etna as Italy’s most exciting new terroir.⁵

Others followed the smoke. Marc de Grazia, an American merchant who had spent years championing Italy’s finest growers, founded Tenuta delle Terre Nere on the northern flank and treated Etna’s lava terraces as seriously as any Burgundian would treat a grand cru. The Belgian Frank Cornelissen went further still, farming his old vines with an almost monastic refusal to intervene. Alongside them worked Salvo Foti, the local oenologist and keeper of tradition whose I Vigneri association fought to save the mountain’s ungrafted, bush-trained old vines and the vanishing craft that tended them. Within a decade these few had turned a forgotten hillside of abandoned terraces into one of the most sought-after names in Italian wine.

Keep exploring Sicilian wine

• Nero d’Avola: Sicily’s great red grape — the island’s signature variety, from bulk-blend anonymity to bottled pride.
• Unifying Italy: Wine and the Risorgimento — how Marsala and Garibaldi’s Thousand tie into the birth of modern Italy.
• Italian Wine: The Complete History — the full national story that Sicily belongs to.

Frequently asked questions

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To go deeper, these books make excellent companions:

The Oxford Companion to Wine

Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding

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The World Atlas of Wine

Hugh Johnson & Jancis Robinson

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Native Wine Grapes of Italy

Ian D’Agata

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References & further reading

1. Jancis Robinson & Julia Harding (eds.), The Oxford Companion to Wine, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2015), s.v. “Sicily,” “Mamertino,” and “Marsala.” ↩
2. Ian D’Agata, Native Wine Grapes of Italy (University of California Press, 2014), chapters on Nero d’Avola, Frappato, Nerello Mascalese, Carricante and Zibibbo. ↩
3. Nicolas Belfrage MW, Brunello to Zibibbo: The Wines of Tuscany, Central and Southern Italy, 2nd ed. (Mitchell Beazley, 2003), the Sicily chapters. ↩
4. Robert C. Davis, “The Bittersweet Taste of British Sicily,” History Today (on the Woodhouse family and the founding of the Marsala trade). ↩
5. Benjamin North Coles, “British Merchants and the Marsala Wine Trade,” in scholarship on the Anglo-Sicilian commercial network of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ↩
6. UNESCO, “Practice of the Traditional Agriculture of Cultivating the ‘Vite ad Alberello’ (Head-Trained Bush Vines) of the Community of Pantelleria” — Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, inscribed 2014. ↩
7. Consorzio di Tutela dei Vini Etna DOC / Italian Ministry of Agriculture (MASAF), disciplinari for Etna DOC (1968) and Cerasuolo di Vittoria DOCG (2005). ↩
8. Benjamin Wallace and regional histories of Sicilian viticulture; Karen MacNeil, The Wine Bible, 2nd ed. (Workman, 2015), “Sicily.” ↩