Wine tasting in Europe, especially in France and Italy, comes with a special advantage – or perhaps it’s a special problem. Lunch is a deeply respected, perhaps sacred, time of the day and everything except the restaurants closes firmly for two hours, to allow dining and maybe a little siesta. If you’re a visitor to local wineries, you are forced to adapt to their customs and take an extended lunch yourself. Ah, the slow and easy life, replete with fine food, local wines and friendly people!
The problem is that if you are visiting from afar, you may not have a lot of time to visit wineries in the morning before lunchtime. And then how can you pass up on a bottle of wine with lunch? Depending on which part of Wine Country you are in, you may not recognize any of the labels on the list, so you just choose the most expensive because even that one is cheap compared to what you’d pay for a bottle at home.
So now it’s 3:00, you may have visited one winery and you’ve tucked away a half a bottle each (assuming you are travelling in a pair, as we always do). And you still have to drive back to where you started the day. Hence, wine tasting in these areas requires a bit of planning and getting up early. Alas, when we went wine tasting in Marsala in Sicily, we neither planned nor set an alarm clock.
Hence we arrived at Cantine Pellegrino’s tasting room at 12:50, ten minutes before the midday closing. The kind lady serving wine told us that there wasn’t enough time for a tour (which we didn’t want anyway) and she would only have enough time to pour us a few sips of their best wines (which was exactly what we did want). Once she saw how interested we were, she cut 20 minutes into her appointed lunch hour(s) and we really got to know their wines. (In fact, we already knew their Nero d’Avola, which we often order at a nearby restaurant at home.)
If you plan to visit Marsala, the center of the greatest wine producing region in Italy, get directions to find Cantine Pellegrino (http://www.carlopellegrino.it/wines/en). Our GPS system took us near there, but led us to the winery itself, a large industrial building. (Grapes are grown in vineyards; wines are made in factories.) Where you want to go is the tasting room located almost a kilometer away, on the sea front.
Cantine Pellegrino’s Ouverture tasting room (Photo courtesy of Cantine Pellegrino)
If your wine tasting experience has been gained mostly in Napa and Sonoma, you’ll feel right at home at Pellegrino. Their tasting room is in a very modern, three-story building that they call Ouverture. Blindingly white in the Sicilian sunshine, it is surrounded on three sides by landscaped walking areas and by the sea on the fourth. As mentioned, the greeting you get is very warm and, well, Italian.
The wines available for tasting cover a very wide range. The basic red wine is Dinari del Duca (the Duke’s Money), either Nero D’Avola or Syrah. As stated, the Nero D’Avola is exported and widely available in the United States. Their top red wine (and also their top white) is Tripudium, a blend of indigenous and international varieties. They also have an Etna Rosso, from the other side of the island.
The best part of the wine tasting experience at Cantine Pellegrino are the wines unique to Sicily. Off the main island, actually nearer Tunisia than Italy, is the island of Pantelleria. Here the primary grape grown is zibbibo and it almost exclusively used for the dessert wine called passito. Half the harvest is vinified and the rest is left on mats in the fields to become raisins. Then the wine is passed over – hence, passito – the raisins, producing an exquisitely sweet product. Be prepared for your server to ask you what the taste reminds you of. (Hint: think apricots)
Then there’s the Marsala wine. Sure, you may know the stuff to cook with, but it’s not much to attract the taste buds of a wine lover. At Pellegrino, you have the chance to taste well-aged, vintage Marsalas. The oldest currently available is the 1981. It tastes nothing like any Marsala you may have tasted, more like an Amontillado sherry.
The town of Marsala is certainly out of the way, but it’s worth a visit. But get there well before lunch.