Carlo Pellegrino

Carlo Pellegrino was founded at Marsala in 1880 and remains family-owned, one of the historic names of Sicilian wine.

Marsala itself is an English invention. In 1773 a Liverpool merchant, John Woodhouse, sheltered in the port, tasted the local wine and realised that fortifying it would let it survive the voyage home; within decades it was a staple of the Royal Navy and of British tables, and Nelson ordered it for his fleet. The style then collapsed into cooking wine through the twentieth century, and the serious dry versions are only now being rediscovered.

The house also works Pantelleria, a volcanic island closer to Tunisia than to Sicily, where Zibibbo bush vines are grown in hollows dug into the ground to shelter them from the wind. That practice was recognised by UNESCO in 2014 as intangible cultural heritage, the first agricultural practice ever listed.