Eating a Sicilian meal this week reminded me of the time I came really close to spending a summer there, but settled instead for Italy's toe, Calabria. I'll admit that back then I suffered from inherited prejudice: my father, who had spent a year in Sicily as a conscript in Mussolini's army had always vowed he'd never return, and the forcefulness of his rhetoric inclined me to believe that Sicily was probably best left to the Sicilians. I let his anti-Sicilian bias lead me instead to a summer in Brancaleone, which means 'lion's paw' in English.

I've still never been there, but now I have a cousin who has married a Sicilian citrus grower and has settled quite happily there. She tells me that life there is just fine, the weather is hot, the food is spicy and the wines are getting better and better. There's a long history of viticulture in Sicily; before the Romans came along it was part of Greater Greece, home for centuries to Hellenic culture and giving history such great names as Diodorus and Archimedes. There's a theory that one of the old grapes of the region, the Aglianico, is actually Greek. The idea is that when you pronounce 'Aglianico' in Italian it sounds like 'ellenico', which is just another word for 'Greek'.

Until recently the Sicilians did what many grape-growers in hot countries did; they planted their vines on the plains, irrigated them, and produced huge quantities of highly alcoholic wine that was of use only as cutting or blending wine. This was sold in bulk to the big northern companies that made vermouth and also to northern bottlers who blended it with their sometimes thin and acidic wines.

Today the Sicilians are trying to create the added value to their own wines, increasingly marketing their wine under their own names and DOCs. Vineyards are moving from the plains to higher land where the vines benefit from a cooler climate and the orientation of the vines tends to be north-south, instead of the more traditional east-west. This shelters the grapes from the intensity of the midday sun and allows for a more balanced ripening across the vines.

These new growing habits have meant that where once only big, overblown reds and perfumed dessert whites were the rule, now more European mainland style reds and whites can be found.

Wine of the Week

Cataratto / Chardonnay 2001, L'Arazzo

This wine is a blend of a traditional Sicilian grape, the Cataratto, and Chardonnay. All the grapes are hand-picked and fermentation is temperature controlled, a must in Sicily's hot climate. The wine has the soft silkiness you'd expect from a warm-climate Chardonnay, plus a slightly acidic tartness in the aftertaste, which comes from the Cataratto grapes. You can taste the gentle oaking, which is done in large casks of Slovenian oaks. As soon as I tasted it I wanted to find some ripe peaches, as this wine is perfect for that Mediterranean habit of slicing mature peaches into a glass of white wine.
RRP €8.95 Available Molloys, The Vintry, Mitchels, Redmonds, Gibneys and Deveneys in Dublin and O'Donovans, Galvins and Champers in Cork.