The Convento Emiliani in Fognano, venue for Brisighella in Bianco IV. Photograph: Roberto Frega

Brisighella is a small hill town in Romagna, between Ravenna and Florence, where the Lamone Valley meets the Tuscan-Romagnol Apennines. Its emblematic white grape is Albana: thick-skinned, naturally structured and capable of producing wines that range from dry and austere to richly sweet. Albana has the same expressive width of Chenin Blanc: in the right hands it can excel at many things. Albana became the first Italian white wine to receive DOCG appellation status, yet remains little known beyond its home region and has never settled into a single widely recognisable style.

That relative obscurity is part of what makes Brisighella interesting. Nineteen local growers have formed an association, Anima dei Tre Colli, and created Brix, a voluntary collective project devoted to dry Albana. Their purpose is not simply to promote a grape or attach a new name to a place. They are experimentally testing whether differences of soil, altitude, exposure, plant material and farming can become more legible when producers agree to limit some of the variables introduced in the cellar.

Brix – the chosen name for the project - is therefore best understood as a collective experiment in terroir. The growers establish common constraints, compare their wines and revise the protocol when experience contradicts the original hypothesis. They do not treat terroir as a taste already stored in the rocks, waiting to be extracted. They are building the practical conditions under which a place may eventually acquire a shared but internally differentiated language.

A Collective Experiment in Terroir

As each year since 2023, on 29 August 2026, at the Convento Emiliani in Fognano, the growers presented the new vintage of Brix. Federica Randazzo, renown Italian wine critic, led a tasting designed to compare wines from different terroirs under the announced theme of stone and clay. The most instructive result of the experiment, however, concerned how one of the rules the growers had originally written for themselves went under scrutiny.

The first version of the Brix protocol had allowed up to twenty-four hours of skin contact. From the 2026 harvest onwards, it no longer will. Albana has thick skins, abundant phenolic material and a naturally firm texture, so a short maceration could seem an obvious way to affirm the grape’s character. Repeated tastings within the association showed the cost: more oxidation, more tannic grip and a recognisable technical signature that could draw wines from different sites towards one another.

The significance lies less in the deleted rule than in the method used to change it. The growers formulated a hypothesis, translated it into a common practice and allowed the wines to expose its limits. A protocol becomes credible when the people who created it are prepared to correct it.

Federica Randazzo leads the tasting on 29 August 2026. Photograph: Roberto Frega.

A Grape Without a Settled Language

Albana became a DOC in 1967 and, in 1987, the first Italian DOCG reserved for a white wine. The distinction, however, did not give the grape a stable identity. The appellation accommodates dry, medium-sweet, sweet and passito wines; producers have also explored sparkling wine, bottle refermentation, skin maceration and ageing in steel, cement, wood and amphora.

The range reflects the grape’s unusual material. Albana’s thick skin, extract and tannic structure made it historically suited to drying and sweetness. Older domestic versions could be deeply coloured, partly sweet, macerated or refermenting, substantial wines made for the pantry and feast days. Passito remains a wine of real cultural importance, though its contemporary market is narrow. At other moments Albana was pushed towards the model of a technically immaculate, clarified white, or recruited into the vocabularies of orange wine, amphora and traditional-method sparkling wine.

Each path can produce compelling bottles. Taken together, they leave an unfamiliar drinker with little idea of what the word Albana promises. That uncertainty is intensified by heat and drought, which can increase sugar, phenolic load and the tendency to oxidise. Deliberate extraction may then add a cellar signature to one already imposed by the season.

Brix does not claim to define the only legitimate identity for the grape. Its narrower ambition is to create enough continuity for comparison. If a small number of conspicuous cellar variables are held within a common range, differences produced by vineyards, vintages and growers may become easier to discuss. This is an experiment in legibility, not a declaration that Albana has finally revealed its essence.

The Collective Has a History

Anima dei Tre Colli began with five established producers: Gallegati, Vigne dei Boschi, Vigne di San Lorenzo, Baccagnano and Fondo San Giuseppe. The Brix project took shape with the 2022 harvest; the association was founded in 2023 and now has nineteen members. Its territory includes Brisighella and the surrounding vineyards that fall within the officially delimited Brisighella subzone.

Brix is not a new appellation. It is a voluntary mark with requirements narrower than those of Albana DOCG. Members taste together, discuss bottles that diverge from the common direction and organise their own public presentation. Before addressing the market, they have to persuade one another and a selected public: they invite journalists and wine critics, and organize comparative tasting with wines coming from other regions. In 2024 eleven Brix wines were produced; six reached the public presentation as the examples the group considered most representative of the work in progress.

Collective action changes what is materially possible. One estate can preserve a rare vine; nineteen can create demand for a nursery to propagate it. One grower can interpret a difficult vintage; a group can compare those interpretations and identify a recurring problem. Terroir in this sense has a collective author, even though every bottle remains the responsibility of an individual estate.

A Map Is Not a Flavour

Map of the landscape units of the Brisighella subzone adopted by the Brix project.

The project’s empirical foundation is a zonation study conducted between 2007 and 2009 over roughly seven thousand hectares, about one thousand of them planted to vines. It included fourteen Albana vineyards, thirty-eight Sangiovese vineyards and twenty-two soil profiles.

The map adopted by Brix translates this complexity into three broad landscape units associated with Brisighella’s landmarks. The Clock Tower represents the finer soils of the lower belt, with yellow sands and red or blue-grey clays. The Manfredian Fortress corresponds to the gypsum ridge known as the Vena del Gesso. The Sanctuary of Monticino leads towards higher elevations, woods, marls and sandstones.

The image is effective as long as its three units are not mistaken for homogeneous enclosures. Geology describes the origin and composition of the subsoil. Vines also encounter soil depth, water availability, exposure, altitude and microbial life. The wine carries further variables: plant age and genetic material, canopy and soil management, harvest date and every choice made in the cellar. Deducing flavour from the colour of a rock would turn geology into astrology.

Zonation has a more useful role. At the highest site studied, 427 metres above sea level on gypsum with a clay-loam matrix, grapes generally showed less sugar, lower pH and higher acidity than the average. This is agronomic evidence rather than a tasting note written in advance. It suggests questions that can be tested across vintages: which practices preserve that difference, does it recur in contrasting years, and how much survives the mediations between vineyard and bottle?

The map establishes possible differences. Brix turns them into a programme of long-term comparison.

Restraint as Experimental Control

The protocol sets a harvest limit of 230 grams per litre of sugar, corresponding to less than fourteen degrees of potential alcohol. Fermentation and ageing take place in wood for six to twelve months. Residual sugar cannot exceed three grams per litre. The wine is released two years after harvest, after at least six months in bottle and only following the event at which the vintage is presented. A lightweight green Bordeaux bottle gives the project a common visual form.

These rules leave many decisions open. Estates still determine how to farm, exactly when to pick, which size and age of vessel to use, whether to add sulphites, and whether to fine or filter. The protocol is closer to an experimental control than to a recipe. It reduces a few conspicuous sources of variation so that less obvious differences have a chance to appear.

The abandoned skin-contact rule shows why restraint cannot be mechanical. Minimalism is a hierarchy among decisions. A gesture is justified when it helps a distinction survive; it becomes suspect when its stylistic signature dominates every wine. Sometimes restraint means doing less. Here it meant recognising that a familiar technique had become too loud for the purpose it was meant to serve.

The Vineyard Does the Heavy Work

Cellar restraint is persuasive only when the vineyard has been asked to do more. Otherwise, minimal intervention becomes a procedure applied to fruit whose balance, genetic material and response to drought have never been reconsidered.

The most consequential Brix requirement therefore concerns new plantings. Members must use more than one clone and devote at least half their vines to DGV10, the clone locally known as “Pizzigatti”. Recovered in the nineteen-nineties from an old Brisighella vineyard and later cleaned up and propagated, Pizzigatti belongs to Albana’s green biotypes. Its bunches remain less coloured, carry a lower phenolic load and are less prone to oxidation. It is also less productive. The trait that once made it unattractive to nurseries is precisely what now makes it coherent with the quality the growers seek. In time, the association hopes to add the older AL19T, connected with the Bagarona biotype and valued for elegance and a lighter tannic load.

This decision changes the timescale. A cellar protocol can be rewritten for the next harvest; the consequences of a new planting will be judged over decades. The work extends to genetic diversity, water conservation, living soils, canopy management and a harvest date that holds sugar, acidity and phenolic maturity in tension.

The apparent asymmetry is the organising principle of the project. Fewer cellar gestures require more knowledge, labour and foresight in the vineyard. The “less” of the wine is made possible by the “more” of the farming: oenological minimalism sustained by viticultural maximalism.

Terroir here is neither raw nature nor a flavour imposed by a map. It is a historical construction made from natural limits and human responses to them. The growers are preparing the vineyards from which a more articulate place may become visible.

What the Glass Can—and Cannot—Prove

The ten wines tasted. From right, the four 2024 Brix wines in serving order, followed by the MonteRe and Corallo Oro verticals from oldest to youngest. Photograph: Roberto Frega.

The tasting on 29 August offered an early test. Four Brix wines from 2024 were followed by two vertical tasting of three vintages each of MonteRe from Vigne dei Boschi and Corallo Oro from Gallegati.

The young wines did not converge. Fiorile 2024 from Fondo San Giuseppe, grown high at Valpiana on the Marnoso-Arenacea formation, was restrained, herbal and gently saline, with the wood behind the fruit. In a blind tasting it could have easily taken for a Chablis. Farfarello 2024 from Poggio della Dogana, on yellow sands and clay, was more explicit and tactile, with peach and apricot and a fuller centre. Amorosa Brix 2024 from Tenuta Uccellina, near the gypsum ridge, was the most direct and acidity-driven, still requiring the bottle age. Podere La Collina’s Brix, from marl, sandstone and clay-limestone soils near woodland, showed a light tannic grip and a project still finding the measure of its oak.

It would be premature to turn these differences into a typology of sandstone, sand or gypsum. The sample is too small and the variables too numerous. A more defensible observation is that limits on alcohol, sweetness and cellar vocabulary have not made the wines identical. Their distances remain visible inside the common frame.

The two verticals complicated the picture usefully. MonteRe 2022, 2023 and 2024 do not come from exactly the same vineyard and were not aged in the same proportion of new wood. Corallo Oro also changed: new barrique and brief skin contact in 2022, older wood in 2023, then a shorter passage through barrels of different ages in 2024. Vintage character and cellar decisions were at least as evident as geology. The younger wines carried more tension; the 2022s had greater depth; the 2023s showed less volume and complexity. At Corallo Oro, reducing the signature of new oak did not reduce the wine’s substance. It made the family resemblance easier to follow.

No honest account can assign every sensation to soil. Wine is the product of many mediations, and the shared protocol makes those mediations discussable rather than pretending to remove them.

Brix has not yet demonstrated a stable territorial grammar for Albana from Brisighella. It has demonstrated something prior: growers can establish a common rule, submit it to a shared test and change it when the wines expose its limit. The decisive evidence will come slowly, through new plantings, contrasting vintages and repeated comparison.

The future of the experiment lies in Pizzigatti clone, because it yields less, in water retained by the soil, in exposures and canopies, and in the willingness to keep arguing in front of the glass. The growers have built conditions under which Brisighella’s differences may become legible. Now they have to let those differences accumulate.

In contrada Civita, at Zafferana Etnea, the wooden seat of a swing still hangs from a branch, held by two ropes. Mauro Cutuli shows me four photographs taken beneath it: his great-grandmother, his grandmother, his mother, himself. The house next door belongs to his mother, and the palmento2 has been left as it was. In that district, in the nineteen-eighties, Luigi Veronelli came looking for the wines of this slope, and in the cellar Mauro found a bottle of Nerello Mascalese from the 1974 harvest.

The first part of this account ended on a heritage without a face: varieties that survived outside the denomination, dry-stone walls falling apart, vineyards left to themselves. A historical memory entrusted to the last old men of the villages, the last to have farmed those plots, the last who know how to work border land with such particular features. Anyone who is eighty today made wine at home, taking the grapes to the palmento for pressing. The generation that followed went off to do other things, and for some forty years the chain that passes knowledge on was broken. The movement now taking these vineyards back in hand is very recent, and it came from outside. The Etna renaissance began in the nineteen-nineties with Benanti and with the almost simultaneous arrival of Frank Cornelissen and Andrea Franchetti. The first capital that believed in the place was, in this sense, foreign. It took another fifteen years for a local movement to grow. Domenico and Mauro are two of its representatives.

Domenico Mancuso (Pietrardita – Biancavilla)

Domenico Mancuso and me in his new plot.

Domenico Mancuso, whom they call Gandhi on Etna, came to the vineyard from philosophy. He comes from a family with farming roots on the mountain that had lost its vineyards and with them the practice of making wine, and he acquired his land gradually, choosing it in areas he considered forgotten. Joking, to me — who like him has a degree in philosophy behind me — he says: “here, if you graduate in philosophy you either teach or you go and dig. I chose the second.”

He built his project on two vineyards on opposite slopes of the mountain, “so as to express a different character and different mixtures with the nature around.” His main vineyard is at Biancavilla, on the south-west slope, in a district with very ancient soils: deposits of ignimbrite dating to an explosive Etna of fifteen to eighteen thousand years ago, welded by heat and oxidised to an amber colour that sets them apart from the black sands of the rest of the mountain. The second plot lies in the municipality of Piedimonte Etneo. Here Domenico has built something close to a conservatory. A singular soil, with a clay component strongly atypical for this area. The parcel sits in a shadow cone that spared it from the lava flows of the last few centuries. From the last old man who still knew it, Domenico has taken up field grafting, a technique almost forgotten because it costs more than nursery-grafted material, and useful again today because it produces more resistant plants. He has recovered and rebuilt all the historical terraces, many of them badly damaged by decades of abandonment. On those terraces he has laid out in sequence the training systems that followed one another over time, from the scattered bush vine to the bush vine in rows to guyot, up to an Etna version of the pergola designed for a changing climate. And he has decided not to plant more than half his hectares to vine, so as to leave intact the ecosystem of chestnuts, fruit trees and wild herbs that surrounds them. His is custodianship in the most exact sense: a continuous judgement, formed under uncertainty.

Contrada Purgatorio sits at eight hundred and forty metres, outside the DOC even though it falls within the municipality of Biancavilla, so much so that the wines are released as IGT Terre Siciliane; the vines are between seventy and a hundred years old, at five thousand plants per hectare and low yields. This is what they call at Biancavilla the Third Gate of Etna, the slope of the sun, with up to an hour more light a day.

Two wines are on the market, both from Biancavilla. Lahar is the red, largely Nerello Mascalese, and it takes its name from a volcanic mudflow: spontaneous fermentation, twenty days on the skins, ten months in steel, no fining and no filtration, moderate use of sulphites, around a thousand bottles. Albavillae is the white, mostly Carricante, and sixty per cent of it is aged in ceramic amphorae. From the 2025 vintage two more wines will be available, from the Piedimonte vineyards, the last to have been planted: Tanò Bianco and Tanò Rosso.

Mauro Cutuli (Grottafumata – Monte Ilice)

Mauro Cutuli, with Grottafumata, closes the circle to the south. His vineyards are on the south-east slope, along the ridge of Monte Ilice between Trecastagni and Zafferana Etnea: a slope facing east that climbs at forty-five degrees, with vines up to a hundred years old on their own roots, worked together with the eighty-year-old owner of the land, who still tends them with his brother. At Civita, at five hundred and forty metres, he has planted at a very tight spacing, more than ten thousand plants per hectare, and the reason is practical: the rows have to match the width of the rotary hoe. But Mauro also has a vineyard at Biancavilla, on the opposite side, to the south-west, where he grows Grenache on an old fifty-year-old planting that he found, he says, “purely by chance, next to my olive grove.” The first vinification of that Grenache he made with Edoardo Torres, from Tenerife. Mauro, like the other growers I visited, does not own a tractor. The rows are too narrow, the vineyards often steep, the terraces very tight, and viticulture here is manual out of necessity.

Of his trade he has a dry idea, and he repeats it like a principle: “for me the vineyard is a place of work, it is not a place of leisure,” and “the experience has to be agricultural, it must not be oenological.” His custodianship is also a position on the territory, and like all custodianship it is fragile.

The most literal piece of recovery is in the barrels. In the family palmento, left as it was, there were the chestnut casks of his grandmother’s father, from the eighteen-hundreds: one of seventy hectolitres and one of twenty-five. To put them back into service he called the last master cooper left in the area, a man with one lung who smokes four packets of cigarettes a day. Together they took them apart and rebuilt them smaller. The seventy came down to twenty-five hectolitres, the twenty-five to six. In 2024 Mauro made his wine in the same casks his great-grandfather had used.

The other gestures run in the same direction, and they are small. When he burns the prunings, on the embers he smokes the tips of the chestnut stakes, so that they will not rot in the ground. He has had all the dry-stone walls in lava rock rebuilt, which he considers historical heritage as much as the vines. He sows a green manure of cereals and legumes. Pure field bean he avoids, because it puts the plant to sleep. In the vineyard he uses copper, sulphur and zeolite, twelve treatments a year.

Among the vines of Monte Ilice there is one they call Zu’ Matteo here, Uncle Matteo. DNA analysis said it is Palomino Fino, the variety used in Spain for fortified wines, which arrived in Sicily with the Spanish colonisation, together with Grenache, and was then forgotten everywhere except here. Mauro vinifies it with Carricante, and in his ancestrale — a wine refermented in bottle by the ancestral method — it makes up thirty per cent. The range holds together on this logic. The Lato Sud line brings together a Carricante macerated on the skins in the Etna tradition, whose first vintage is 2017, a red from Nerello, and the Grenache from Biancavilla, the one he himself calls “ruffiana.” Giulé carries the initials of his daughters’ names, Giulia and Leda: seventy per cent Carricante and thirty Zu’ Matteo, three hundred bottles, an ancestrale made partly to take a position. “The sparkling wines on Etna are made from Mascalese because it’s close to Pinot Noir,” he says; “we should be making things close to the Mediterranean, not to Champagne.” He ferments without temperature control, filters only when volatile acidity climbs too high, and aims at around eleven degrees.

Recovery is intense work and probably loss-making. Custodianship of a territory imposes personal and family sacrifices that are often very high. In 2024 Mauro put a thousand young plants into the new planting at Civita, one by one, by hand, at eighty centimetres deep. Not one survived. That summer the outside temperature reached thirty-five degrees and the ground measured forty, and volcanic sand holds no water. He applied for the drought compensation. He is still waiting for it. Then in the summer of 2026 came the fire, probably set deliberately, which degraded the oldest vineyard, the reservoir from which he took the budwood for his massal selections.

What these recovered varieties give is better understood by drinking them than by explaining them. Zu’ Matteo brings to Giulé a yellow-fleshed fruit that Carricante alone does not have. The macerated Carricante of Lato Sud has the colour of old gold and a silky texture that skin contact, in other hands, tends to stiffen. Domenico’s Lahar sits on red and black fruit, with a herbaceous base and a note of liquorice; Albavillae, which spends sixty per cent of its life in ceramic amphora, plays on citrus and closes savoury. These are wines that express a whole world of terroir in fine, delicate flavours.

A Community in the Making

At the end of our conversation Mauro put it better than I could: “when you fight battles of resistance you feel alone,” and the sense of that work, he added, is “becoming aware of being a community on Etna.” But the community he speaks of is still a project, not a fact. The knowledge that holds these vineyards up lies with the old people they are relearning it from, and those old people will not be here forever. In the coming years one of two things will have happened: either that knowledge will have passed in full into younger hands, or it will have been lost with the last person who kept it. Recovery, for now, is a race against time.

In this account the old people are three, and none of them makes wine. There is the owner of the land at Monte Ilice, eighty years old, who still tends his hundred-year-old vines with his brother and works them alongside Mauro. There is the last master cooper left in the area, without whom the nineteenth-century casks would have stayed as staves piled up in a palmento. And there is the grower who taught Domenico field grafting, a technique few people still know. In one case what is needed is hands, in another a trade, in the third a gesture you learn only by watching it done. None of the three has a designated successor.

Sulle Bucce is the fair of the Etna winegrowers. For the 2026 edition, I was invited to present my book on post-natural wine. It became the occasion for a journey of discovery I owe to Mauro Cutuli. Mauro, who runs the Grottafumata winery, had written to me a few months earlier, and the letter took me by surprise. A grower writing to an unknown wine writer to say that what he had found in a text was, a new experience. What he had found, he put this way: “Reading this book, I said to myself: here I am finding reasons.” Reasons for work that he and others had been doing for years. The visits he organized were meant to show me how many of the themes my book develops theoretically are already shared knowledge in the practices and reflections of a small, combative community of Etna growers. All of them started making wine no more than ten years ago, and nearly all of them farm on the mountain’s lesser-known slopes, often outside the Etna Appellation — in climatic, geological, and ampelographic conditions that surprise anyone who only knows the Etna of the north slope.

Overall, I met with four winemakers. Sonia Gambino farms in Maletto, the volcano’s highest municipality, on the western slope, outside the denomination. Sébastien Burel, French by origin, arrived from Burgundy after the pandemic, and his vineyards lie a little further on, in the Tartaraci district within the territory of Bronte — also outside the Etna Appellation. Domenico Mancuso, whom people on the Etna call Gandhi, works two plots on opposite flanks of the mountain, in Biancavilla and Piedimonte Etneo. Mauro closes the circle to the south. Four growers whose testimony tells of another Etna, and also of a quiet community whose work of custodianship deserves to be read and heard. The story of the book became the occasion for discovering their work. This article and the next tell of these encounters, of this community, of the grape varieties, the practices, and the values of a territory rich in history and biodiversity, with forms of knowledge all at risk of being lost — a uniqueness best understood against the background of its history.

The Boundary of 1968

In 1968, the production code of the Etna DOC drew a semicircle around the volcano, open to the west. It was Sicily’s first denomination of origin, and it covered twenty municipalities on the mountain’s lower slopes. The shape was that of an inverted C, leaving the western flank outside. Maletto, Bronte, and Maniace remained beyond the boundary. The Appellation determines where the line runs and says nothing about why. A map, in those years, decided which Etna would have a name.

The twenty years of the Etna renaissance then narrowed that perimeter further. Attention concentrated on the north slope, on the districts of Passopisciaro and Solicchiata that became objects of cult status, on Nerello Mascalese sold the way a Burgundy cru is sold. Mauro, who makes his wine on the other side, offered me his counter-map: the code’s C has in effect shrunk to the north alone, while the south forms a second C, inverted upward, holding together the beginning of the east and of the west. It is the reading of someone who looks at the mountain from below, and it redraws the boundary rather than arguing with it. On the fact, though, he is right. There is a celebrated Etna, and there is another one.

In 1968, the production code of the Etna DOC drew a semicircle around the volcano, open to the west. It was Sicily’s first denomination of origin, and it covered twenty municipalities on the mountain’s lower slopes. The shape was that of an inverted C, leaving the western flank outside. Maletto, Bronte, and Maniace remained beyond the boundary. The Appellation determines where the line runs and says nothing about why. A map, in those years, decided which Etna would have a name.

The twenty years of the Etna renaissance then narrowed that perimeter further. Attention concentrated on the north slope, on the districts of Passopisciaro and Solicchiata that became objects of cult status, on Nerello Mascalese sold the way a Burgundy cru is sold. Mauro, who makes his wine on the other side, offered me his counter-map: the code’s C has in effect shrunk to the north alone, while the south forms a second C, inverted upward, holding together the beginning of the east and of the west. It is the reading of someone who looks at the mountain from below, and it redraws the boundary rather than arguing with it. On the fact, though, he is right. There is a celebrated Etna, and there is another one.

An Etna outside the spotlight, where the estates are small, nearly all of them started in the last few years. An Etna less contended by the market and by national and international players, one that lives on more extreme geographies. Zafferana Etnea knows the volcano’s most recent eruptions, and the presence of lava is more insistent there. Maletto lies farther from the active cones, but its vineyards sit at much higher elevations, close to a thousand meters, while the vineyards of Tartaraci stand at nine hundred and eighty. At these elevations Nerello Mascalese struggles, and the dominant red variety is Grenache. The surrounding landscape changes too. On the north slope, vines cover entire hillsides, forming intensive monocultures. In these minority zones, the vine has never lost its status as one crop among others. The plots rarely measure more than a few thousand square meters, they stand apart from one another, and they are set among chestnut groves, hazelnut orchards, fruit trees, and vegetable gardens. They are worked by hand, because no machine can get in. Here everything is heroic, out of necessity. What was left outside the map was also left outside the grape variety the map imposed on the imagination. The result is a deposit of varieties that nobody pulled out, for lack of reasons to replace them.

Forty-Five Hectares for Nelson’s Heirs

Grenache arrived up here from elsewhere, more than two centuries ago. It adapted perfectly and never left. In 1799, Ferdinand IV of Bourbon granted Admiral Horatio Nelson the title of Duke of Bronte and a large estate around the Abbey of Maniace. Nelson died at Trafalgar six years later, having never seen his Duchy. It was his heirs, the Bridports, who over the course of the nineteenth century brought in French and Spanish experts and planted Alicante and Grenache on a large scale, aiming to replicate on the volcano the success the English had built with Marsala at the other end of Sicily. The commercial venture failed. The vines stayed.

In the Duchy, the Grenache vineyards reached forty-five hectares, and the choice of variety was a technical decision. The dukes hired the French oenologist Louis Fabre, who determined that Grenache Noir from the Roussillon was preferable on that slope, being more productive, earlier to ripen, with high basal fertility and leaves more resistant to wind. Among the candidates set aside were Syrah, Tinto Negro, Palomino — present elsewhere, as we will see in the second piece devoted to Another Etna — and Nerello Mascalese. The grape variety that today defines the Etna, on that flank of the mountain, lost a competition in the nineteenth century.

The variety that today, in Maletto and Bronte, is considered native arrived two centuries ago by the will of English heirs, by the hand of foreign ampelographers, for a market objective. The Etna Grenache descends from that experiment. It survived phylloxera, and it survived concentrated in precisely the northwestern sectors that the denomination would later leave on the margins. At Gurrida, one own-rooted vineyard remains, saved by a circumstance nobody had planned: each year the waters of a lake submerge it, and the insect cannot reach it. The name has held up less well than the plant. Locally it is called granazzu, or ranaci, with forms that change from district to district.

Sonia Gambino (Gustinella – Maletto)

Sonia Gambino came back to Maletto by a long road. Born in Milan to parents from the town, she studied at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, specialized in oenology in Montpellier, spent a year as an assistant at Château Léoville-Las Cases in Bordeaux, then worked in Chile and New Zealand, then spent a few years in wine communication in Milan, and finally worked in Marsala with Nino Barraco. Covid brought her back to her father’s town by chance. The temporary pause became a choice of life.

Maletto is the highest municipality on the Etna, close to a thousand meters, an enclave set within the territory of Bronte and kept outside the Etna Appellation. For Sonia, the exclusion is twofold, and she tells it without resentment: “the town is excluded from the Etna appellation both horizontally, I mean the Maletto-Bronte strip, and vertically.” She simply calls it another Etna. The winery carries her family’s name: her grandfather, Peppe Gustinello, ran the town’s palmento, the small communal winery where farmers brought their grapes to be vinified. The technical layer that today rests on the knowledge of the old people comes from her studies and international experience.

The heart of her work is an old vineyard, which she began to farm by overcoming the resistance of the locals, skeptical of a young oenologist raised elsewhere. Vincenzo entrusts it to her, asking not for rent but for three hundred fifty liters of wine a year, the standard household consumption of the local elderly. From there begins her discovery of the local tradition: bush vines, mass selection, and everything interplanted, white grapes and black grapes in the same planting. It was a farmer’s caution against the frost of the high elevations: if one variety failed, the other held. Today that caution is biodiversity within a single plot.

When she asks what was planted in those vineyards, the old people of the town stop and say “nu sacciu.” I don’t know. These are varieties nobody can name anymore. Sonia preserves them, propagating them by mass selection instead of buying nursery cuttings: it is the gesture that keeps alive an ampelographic heritage that would otherwise disappear.

The varieties she defends belong to the local tradition. Among black grapes: Grenache, here granazzu, together with Nerello Mascalese and a Tinto Nero; among white grapes: Grecanico Dorato, Minnella, Albanello, Trebbiano, Moscatella. The vineyards climb past eleven hundred meters, and the Nave district, source of the rosé, reaches the highest elevation. Destemming is done by hand, with a perforated wooden frame built by a craftsman. In the cellar: steel, reclaimed cement, demijohns, spontaneous fermentations, no filtration, and very little sulfur.

There are four wines, and the most representative declares itself in its name. Vino di Confine — “Border Wine” — names this land of encounters and stratifications. It comes from the mixed vinification of a dozen white and black varieties together, as they stood in the vineyard. Alongside it stand the Jungìmmune Bianco, a field blend with a few hours on the skins; the Jungìmmune Rosato, from the Nave vineyard; and the Jungìmmune Rosso, mostly Grenache, with twenty-five days of maceration. About ten thousand bottles in all.

Sébastien Burel (La Ripresa – Tartaraci)

Sébastien Burel comes from France. He was trained at the Beaune wine school, after a course of study in political science. In France he worked for about twenty years, between Burgundy and Chablis — at Château de Béru — before choosing the Etna as the place where to build his own project. He arrived here right after the pandemic. He was looking for a place near the sea but not arid, where ripening would let him keep alcohol levels under control and make wines of finesse, lightly extracted. He found it between the Tartaraci district, in the territory of Bronte, and the Maletto area, around a thousand meters. We are a few kilometers from Sonia’s vines, on the same slope. His estate is called, aptly, La Ripresa — “the recovery.”

He speaks of the soil as a fertile contradiction: “just dust, but it’s rich enough that the grass really grows like crazy.” Of the frost, which returns every year at these elevations, he says it is “still a war.” The main vineyard, in Tartaraci Sottana, sits at nine hundred eighty meters; the other, toward Maletto, is at roughly the same elevation and measures just under two hectares. Grenache is present everywhere. He spent four years rejuvenating, vine by vine, terraces abandoned after years of chemical treatments, with very long pruning against the frost. Organic conversion will reach certification in 2027.

He talks about Grenache as a poorly kept secret: “I always have to explain that there’s actually a 200-year-old tradition here. For everyone it’s a big surprise.” About the character of his piece of mountain, he has a formula that carries the weight of a production code: “if you’re talking about Bronte, it’s Grecanico, Grenache — it’s neither Carricante nor Nerello.” Sébastien, like the Grenache he tends, is a foreigner, and he arrived here after crossing Europe: he chooses what the center had let fall, and magnifies its worth.

Sébastien does not yet have a cellar of his own. He has relied, in turn, on others — first Bentivegna, then Salvo, and from 2027 he will be at Passopisciaro with Massimo Lentsch. He ferments spontaneously, neither fines nor filters, adds very little sulfur and only at bottling, and ages his wines long in bottle. He rejects the practice, widespread on the Etna, of building “acid bases” by picking grapes less ripe to construct acidity: “I’m not convinced — I’d rather bring the grapes to proper maturity.” His model is the Jura. On the cliché of the Etna as the Burgundy of the Mediterranean, he is blunt and critical: “in the end, here there’s little cellar culture of a really high level — every grower cooks in his own kitchen, his own way.” His sharpest criticism concerns natural wine as facade, and those who buy grapes: “buying the grapes is exactly how you go about corrupting the concept of natural wine.”

The current range stands at around eight thousand bottles, against a higher initial target, and that gap measures the slowness of these recoveries. The flagship wine, Tartari, from Nerello Mascalese alone; two Grenaches from successive vintages, the first closer to “infusion,” the second from longer maceration with the stems; a blend of Nerello and Grenache; a rosé, the Sorge; a pet-nat he remains undecided about, given the tiny market for it; and a still white on the way, from Grecanico.

“Nu sacciu”

The wine’s profile changes considerably from one vineyard to the next: from wines pale in color and light on the palate, with raspberry, wild strawberry, cherry, and rhubarb over a base of Mediterranean scrub, to wines more concentrated and spiced, with vibrant tannin and pronounced acidity. The varietal traits of Grenache are totally dominated by the powerful terroir. The variable that orders the spectrum is elevation: “the higher you go, the more elegant it becomes.” It is the same agronomic reason why, up here, Grenache held its ground in place of Nerello. In Sonia’s and Sébastien’s vineyards, the whole range is visible. Sébastien makes two Grenaches from successive vintages, the first worked more by infusion, the second with longer maceration and with the stems. Sonia keeps most of hers for the Jungìmmune Rosso, with twenty-five days on the skins. In local tradition, Grenache went into Etna reds blended with Nerello, between twenty and forty percent — a mixed-vineyard use, before anyone thought of vinifying it alone.

On the other slope, to the south, two more growers follow a similar path. Domenico Mancuso farms, in Biancavilla, soils of ignimbrite dating to an explosive Etna of fifteen thousand years ago. He too is outside the denomination, and he too worked under the guidance of an old man who taught him field grafting, a technique no one practiced anymore. Mauro Cutuli, on the slope of Monte Ilice, has century-old own-rooted vines and his great-grandfather’s chestnut casks, brought back into use by the last master cooper in the area. Like Sonia and Sébastien, he too tends to a fifty-year-old Grenache vineyard next to his olive grove.

Of them, and of what it costs to keep alive a knowledge that lives in the old people, we speak in the second part.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, painted by Jakob Schlesinger in 1831. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin. He never wrote a word about wine.

A philosopher writing about wine is already a risk. A philosopher writing about Hegel is a punishment. I am doing both at once, and only once: Hegel is here for a single job, it takes him about a page, and I have no intention of discussing his aesthetics, or Kant on beauty, or Hume on taste. From the next piece on, bottles.

Why Bring Hegel into This

Hegel in the Vineyard sounds like a joke, and it partly is. No grower has ever needed the Phenomenology of Spirit to decide when to pick. And philosophy applied to taste produces, with some regularity, pages that taste does not recognize.

There is a reason to trouble the philosopher of Jena, and it has to do with the way wine has been discussed for the past twenty years: around the opposition between natural wine and conventional wine. In philosophical terms this is a dyad, a pair of terms in which each is defined by the negation of the other. Anyone who writes, makes, sells or simply drinks wine has learned to place themselves in relation to it, by adherence or by refusal. The two words are now enough to predict a person’s verdict on a bottle before they have tasted it.

The opposition satisfies almost no one, and the first not to recognize themselves in it are the people who make wine. Among the growers I know, nearly all reject protocol-driven winemaking, and nearly none identifies with natural wine. Asked where they stand, they fall back on a compromise and try to change the subject: a little technique, and only when needed. The formula does not satisfy them, because it describes a middle position while theirs is a different one. Hegel comes in here, to say in what sense it is different.

Whoever files these growers under one of the two terms is doing philosophy too, without knowing it. Reasoning by binary oppositions is a conceptual choice that presents itself as neutral description, and it decides in advance which judgments can be made: whoever does not belong to one term belongs to the other. Either you are natural or you are conventional. The grower who claims a position of their own and refuses the compromise is doing something else, something Hegel spent a lifetime on: getting out of an exhausted opposition without picking a side.

Hegelian reasoning is already at work in what growers do, and missing from the discourse that describes them. Since getting out of an opposition requires knowing its structure, we need to look at how this one was built.

The Invention of the Conventional

The natural-conventional dyad has a short and documentable history. The word “conventional” enters the wine lexicon as an attribution, not as a claim: it is the name that the supporters of natural wine give to what they are distancing themselves from. What the tradition treated as a canon, the set of technical choices recognized by the winemaking community, is redescribed as a convention, that is, as a set of contingent choices.

The redescription has two unpleasant consequences. The first is that it corners nearly every actor in world viticulture into the uncomfortable category of the “conventional,” and nobody stands there willingly: imagine a writer saying, “my style is conventional.” The second is a reversal of the burden of proof. Under a canon, the burden falls on whoever departs from it; once the canon is redescribed as a convention, the burden falls on the canon itself. Hence the endless interrogation: how much sulfur do you use, how tight is your filtration, how much new oak.

The invention of natural wine is one of the great marketing coups in the history of wine. It is also an unfair one, because under “conventional” it gathered two practices that are worth keeping apart: classical winemaking and industrial winemaking.

By classical winemaking I mean the model that from the 1990s onward brought the microbiology of fermentation into wine: the role of yeasts, bacteria and enzymes, the formation of aromatic precursors, temperature control, the measurement of phenolic ripeness. Its representative figure is the consulting enologist, the flying winemaker, who works across different terroirs applying reproducible protocols. The wines that come out of it cost hundreds of euros, and even the critics most hostile to the model acknowledge that they are successful. The objection is not about quality: it is about the variety of the world. That model spread a uniform idea of excellence, and made wines born in very distant places resemble one another.

Industrial winemaking uses similar tools for a different end: a constant product at minimum cost. The amount of technique is comparable, the tools sometimes coincide, and the whole difference lies in the end. Classical winemaking pursues excellence and uses reproducibility as a means; industrial winemaking pursues constancy and makes reproducibility its purpose. The science is the same: what changes is the question put to it.

The natural wine movement could not help being blind to this difference. A criterion that measures the amount of intervention looks at means, and on means the two models converge: both add and both correct. The crudeness of the judgment comes from the structure of the criterion, not from bad faith on the part of those who apply it.

The difference between the two models is visible, but not where the debate went looking for it. If their operations resemble each other in the cellar, in the vineyard they diverge. It is not rare to find representatives of classical winemaking who have adopted the most advanced agronomic practices, and it is not rare to find “natural” wines made from grapes of opaque genealogy.

The criterion that discriminates therefore belongs to a plane the dyad does not contemplate. Its two terms disagree on the answer and agree on the question: both establish the value of a wine from what happens in the cellar, one attributing it to the correctness of the intervention, the other to its absence. Conventional and natural are the symmetrical opposites of a single underlying assumption, the primacy of the cellar in the normative definition of wine.

A Monad in Dyadic Disguise

Let us follow Hegel one step further. The natural-conventional pair is not a true dyad. It is a monad in disguise: a single criterion generating both terms, scored once positively and once negatively. For two terms to form a genuine dyad, each would have to bring a criterion of its own. Here there is only one criterion, the amount of intervention in the cellar sets its scale, and the two terms occupy its extremes.

Hegel comes to our aid, because he teaches that dyads are unstable and that one has to look for a standpoint outside them. Leaving the cellar and going back to the vineyard unmasks the dyad for what it is. It also yields an explanation of the natural wine quarrel, whose intensity has struck many observers as disproportionate to the stakes. People fight hardest over what they in fact agree on in general terms, so that the violence of the contrast measures how much of the criterion is shared rather than how far the positions stand apart.

Only by unmasking the dyad can the voice of the growers who recognize themselves in neither term finally take shape.

The Third Term

It was the growers, not the critics, who put Hegel in the vineyard: the shift happened in practice before it was formulated in words. The last two generations have distinguished themselves by what they began doing in the vineyard more than by what they stopped doing in the cellar. Plant material selection, soil management, the architecture of the vine have taken the place the previous generation gave to lowering sulfur and refusing filtration. It is, to borrow from another philosopher who detested Hegel, the twilight of the enological idols.

That gesture has a name. The German verb aufheben means both to abolish and to preserve, and Aufhebung is the operation by which a new position keeps what the previous ones held that was sound and takes from them the claim to account for everything. For the operation to work, though, the third term must bring a criterion the first two do not have. In wine that criterion is the shift of attention from the cellar to the vineyard.

The reason is simple. As soon as you look at the vineyard, “conventional” splits: classical winemaking comes away from industrial winemaking, because scientific knowledge comes away from the use that has been made of it. The same happens on the natural side. When the ideology of “no” gives way to the pragmatism of “a little, and when it is needed,” we are looking at a quiet revolution. The concept of post-natural wine, which Hegel would not have approved of (but nobody is perfect), names this third position.

A monad allows a single logical operation, opposition: either you are natural or you are conventional.

A triad allows distinction, because it has a place for what differs from both without standing between them. The third term does not add a model to the list: it adds an operation. A judgment becomes sayable that was not sayable before, namely that a model can be legitimate and at the same time not shared. I can admire the perfection of a Lynch-Bages without wanting to drink it.

The classicism of late twentieth-century scientific enology made possible wines whose greatness deserves to be acknowledged, and which find no place in today’s wine discourse. Wines that made history and defined an aesthetic canon, a style that dominated a time and a place. The greatness of the classical is precisely what the discourse of natural wine conceals.

From his position in the middle of the vineyard, Hegel lets us see two differences the dyad kept hidden: on one side the difference between classical wines and industrial wines, on the other the difference between classical wines and natural wines.

Where Hegel Stops

Here our path parts from Hegel. In his system the third term is the truth of the two that precede it. Applied to wine, the thesis would say that classical winemaking was post-natural without knowing it, and that natural wine was a stage on the way to something it did not yet know. That is not what I mean. Hegel is useful for getting out, not for arriving. He tells us that the opposition is exhausted, that it has to be looked at from outside, and that what once occupied the whole field now occupies only a part of it. Here we have to take our leave, because beyond the threshold there is no synthesis: the three terms remain irreducible to one another, and each of them constitutes an exclusive cultural apparatus, irreducible to the other two.

They remain irreducible because they are not stages in a history. They are genres, and genres coexist. In the history of the arts, classicism, romanticism and naturalism do not succeed one another by elimination: they persist as different ways of solving the same formal problems, and each period inflects them in its own manner, with hybrids, revivals and impure forms. None of the three is the truth of the other two.

Three Genres, Three Ideas of Success

The same holds for wine. Classical winemaking, natural wine and post-natural wine are three wine genres, and each has its own idea of success, discussed and negotiated by a community that recognizes it. For the classical, a wine succeeds when it realizes a codified project: balance, definition, conformity to a repeatable ideal. For the natural, it succeeds when it bears faithful witness to a process no one directed, and deviation can count fully as part of the success. For the post-natural, it succeeds when the vintage and the place remain legible through the gesture that accompanied them. These are ideal types, constructions that guide description: few real growers match any one of them completely.

Canons of this kind are not commensurable, and none of them can be judged by the criteria of another. A classical wine assessed by the natural canon will always come out as manipulated. A natural wine assessed by the classical canon will always come out as faulty. These are category mistakes, and the dyad produced them continuously because it had no other way of judging.

This is the gift of Hegel in the vineyard: a three-term structure makes visible what a two-term structure concealed. A judgment of success is internal to a genre and is argued with the criteria of that genre. A judgment of taste is mine, and commits no one else. The dyad made the two coincide: whoever was not on the right side was on the wrong one. That is why the growers I began with have no voice.

Respect Without Affection

Separating the two judgments has a price, and it is paid by whoever separates them. Admiring the perfection of a Lynch-Bages without wanting to drink it means admitting that one’s own irritation is a preference, not a verdict. Anyone who already loves classical wines gives up nothing by calling them classical: they were granting them value in any case. Anyone who does not love them has to concede something they would rather not concede, and that concession is the entire content of the new word. A renaming that cost no one anything would change nothing.

“Conventional” allowed one not to discuss the other side’s reasons, because it declared them arbitrary from the start. “Classical” forces one to recognize them as a tradition, and to recognize that one’s own distance is a matter of taste, not of superiority.

Hegel in the vineyard has taught me to respect wines I will probably go on not drinking. It is the least comfortable result of this reconstruction, and the only one I could not have reached by staying inside the dyad.