Winemaking on the Slopes of Sicily’s Volcano

(WSJ) - VISITING FRANK Cornelissen ’s winery means driving along a dangerously winding road that starts on the shores of the Mediterranean and ends high on the slopes of Mount Etna. Cornelissen, a wiry Belgian-born winemaker, has spent more than a decade in the volcano’s northern valley, often sleeping in his cellar, always toiling in his vineyards and forever explaining his methodology with the voluble erudition of a philosophy professor. But now, as we uncork one of his earliest vintages, Cornelissen is silent. He pours the almost-black liquid from the bottle, with hand-painted calligraphic lettering on its side, sniffing it to make sure it’s OK. He passes me a glass, uttering just two words: “Liquid stone.” That’s not a description I’d ever thought a wine should aspire to. After one sip, I understand what he means. This liquid stone is not just complex and delicious; it’s pushing the boundaries of winemaking.

Cornelissen, beloved by oenophiles from Tokyo to Paris, is one of the most successful entirely self-taught winemakers in the world. “I started with half a hectare of vines that I tended myself,” he says. “I’d never grown grapes or made wine before. For three years I was a gardener. Then I learned to be a farmer.” Cornelissen’s premium wine, called Magma, now sells for upward of $650 a magnum in restaurants. He’s become known as one of the foremost makers of “natural wine”—though he rejects that designation in favor of the term “non-interventionist.”

Purists may argue over exactly what natural or non-interventionist wine means, but Cornelissen explains his method in a deceptively simple way: “I make wine out of nothing but grapes,” he says. “No sulfites, no acid correction, no sugar, no added yeasts.” While organic and biodynamic wines focus primarily on cultivation and harvesting, natural wine focuses on the vinification phase—but few vintners do so quite as radically as Cornelissen. “Adding sulfites to wine is like riding on train tracks,” he explains. “You box the wine inside the rails. So while you limit the chances of something bad happening, you also limit the chances of something extraordinary and unexpected.”

Around the time he arrived, two other outsiders were staking a claim on Etna’s soil: Andrea Franchetti, an Italian who had long sold wine in America and then started producing his own vintages in Tuscany, and Marco de Grazia, a famed Italian-American wine importer and consultant who is credited with creating, from virtually nothing, the lucrative Barolo market in the United States. A fourth winemaker, Salvatore Foti, born in nearby Catania, had been making wine for other vintners before striking out on his own. Francis Di Savino, wine expert and co-author of The World of Sicilian Wine, put it this way: “Each of these four helped make Etna wine what it is today. Cornelissen contributed the philosophy. De Grazia provided an ideal based on the contrata system, which emphasized the special conditions of each small plot. Franchetti founded the first forum for tasting all of Etna’s wines and contributed a spirit of cooperation and collaboration. Foti helped preserve the history and tied current winemaking to Etna’s past.”

Though these four are now producing some of the finest red wine not just in Italy but in Europe, this outcome was not guaranteed. Because the climate and conditions are so variable, all of Etna’s winemakers have had less than stellar vintages; Cornelissen’s extreme methodology only amplified the risks. In 2004, his wines had high voluble acidity, making them hard to enjoy—a problem he corrected in future years.

Hearing these winemakers talk about the risks and rewards of their terroir made me realize there’s much more to the area than just wine. The sense of isolation here is profound. People in this part of Etna aren’t just cut off from the Italian mainland; they speak a dialect of Sicilian different from coastal dwellers. Though parts of Sicily, such as the nearby town of Taormina, have become established destinations, tourism in this corner of Etna is still in its infancy—travelers are just starting to discover this rustic, deeply traditional part of the country, far from Italy’s tourist meccas.

Etna has a long and storied winemaking history. It appears—with its wine—in Homer’s Odyssey. The northern region of Etna later became known for producing sfuso, cheap table wine for local farmers, as well as “cutting wine,” barrels of strong-tasting stuff shipped to mainland Italy to give vintages produced there more backbone. But it took these four winemakers to notice a few key features of the northernmost subregion of Etna that make it ideal for producing world-class red wine—aspects that place its terroir in a league with the choicest regions in France or California, more so than almost anywhere else in southern Europe. Vineyards here range from 1,000 to 3,300 feet above sea level, an elevation uncommon among southern European wineries. Higher-altitude vines undergo extreme temperature variation from day to night, helping to produce excellent grapes. What’s more, the indigenous Etna red-wine grape varietal, Nerello Mascalese, held the promise of greatness, even if it hadn’t yet been made into world-class wine. The composition of the soil, formed from centuries of intense volcanic activity, is not only especially nutritive; it also varies from subregion to subregion, allowing for small holdings in the same area to yield very different wines, much as they do in Burgundy.

Randazzo, the largest town in the region, comes alive at sundown, when its main street is closed to cars. The heart of the village, with its cobblestone streets and an ancient tabaccheria, feels locked in time. Driving east from Randazzo—the easternmost boundary of the winemaking region—I arrive at a grand estate, Feudo Vagliasindi, now turned into a hotel by the family that has owned it for generations. Paolo Vassallo Vagliasindi, who runs the place with his brother, greets me and escorts me to a second-floor terrace with a view stretching across vineyards to the volcano itself, now furiously puffing smoke. As Vagliasindi walks me around the hotel, he explains that the property was once his family’s country estate and winery. “Our main house was in Randazzo,” he says, “but for many years my relatives would come here to escape town, to relax and to oversee the production of our wine.” He leads me downstairs and opens a creaking wooden door that leads into a huge, high-ceilinged chamber.

“This is the palmento,” Vagliasindi says. “It was the traditional way of making wine in Sicily. First you crush the grapes with your feet; then the wine is carried down by gravity into the vats where it ferments.” Palmentos fell out of use in the 1990s, when EU regulations forbade their use for commercial wine (the fear was that their open-air construction made them prone to contamination). The family estate was virtually in ruins when Vagliasindi and his brother decided to renovate it and open their hotel five years ago. Though the grand exterior is visible from miles away, inside the accommodations are simple and comfortable. My visit reminds me that, a century ago, there were still hundreds of working palmentos dotting this landscape, churning out wine that visitors from mainland Italy considered some of the best in the country. It took a small group of outsiders to revive this heritage.