Echoes of Mount Etna: The Grand Cru Vision of Terre Nere
Some wines you choose, others choose you
Jan de Weerd, Spoken Wines
This will hide itself!
Echoes of Mount Etna: The Grand Cru Vision of Terre Nere
Some wines you choose, others choose you
Some stories are born in vineyards. Others begin with a whisper across an ocean, in a city far from any slope. But when the wine is real—when it carries the soul of its place—it finds you. It calls you. And if you listen, it might just change your life.
It was a snowy December night in Chicago, 2016. We opened a bottle from a place we had never been—Guardiola, a contrada on the northern slope of Mount Etna, Sicily. The wine was volcanic, ethereal, haunting. We didn’t know then that the vineyard sat nearly a thousand meters above sea level. We didn’t know that the vines were rooted in ancient lava flows, or that someone—Marco de Grazia—had once felt the same pull from this very place.
Nine years later, we met the winery, beneath the looming grace of Etna, we sat down with Christian Liistro, the warm and eloquent ambassador of Tenuta delle Terre Nere, and stepped fully into the story that had been calling us for nearly a decade.
The visionary who listened to the mountain
Before Mount Etna became one of the world’s most revered terroirs, it was nearly silent—at least in the wine world. Sicily, known for bulk production, offered little space for nuance. But Marco de Grazia heard something different in the winds above Castiglione di Sicilia. In the late nineteen nineties, when there were only eight wineries on the mountain, he walked among the old vines of Guardiola and chose not just a vineyard, but a new life.
Christian spoke of Marco as a man compelled by vision and reflection. Like a Burgundian vigneron, Marco believed each parcel of land had a voice. His goal was not to impose, but to reveal. What the Côte d'Or has in climats, Etna now has in contrade. Marco saw that Etna's fragmented terrain, shaped by a mosaic of different lava flows, was worthy of classification and care. His approach mirrored Burgundy: crafting wines from a blend of vineyards, from single sites, and ultimately from parcels that spoke as grand crus. And so, the quiet revolution began.
Crafting wines from single sites, and ultimately from parcels that spoke as grand crus.
Terroir as a living mosaic
To walk the slopes of Mount Etna is to walk through contradiction: ash and snow, fire and fog, the ancient and the ever-emerging. Terre Nere’s vineyards span altitudes from 600 to 1,000 meters, each with distinct soils.
Christian described the landscape with emotion. Each contrada is a world unto itself. What makes these wines singular is not just the soil, but how that soil converses with light, wind, and altitude.
Now, with the same careful hierarchy Marco applied to Nerello Mascalese, the estate has begun to express Carricante, Etna’s noble white grape, in the same way: as village wines, premier cru-level expressions, and (soon) wines worthy of being called white grand crus.
It’s about truth. And trust in the land. www.tenutaterrenere.com/en/
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