Bella-Colonna Etna Rosso 2024
£28.75
The wine
Ruby red, with ripe red fruit and sweet spice on the nose. The palate is fresh, rich and well balanced, its structure elegant rather than heavy, and the finish long.
This is the Bella-Colonna parcel itself, in the township of Randazzo on Etna’s northern slope at 600 to 650 metres, where volcanic soil and altitude make for fresh, elegant wine. The vines run from five to fifty years old, goblet-trained in the traditional way, and yields sit at five to six tonnes per hectare. Marco de Grazia is among the pioneers of modern Etna; after establishing Tenuta delle Terre Nere in 2002 he kept a set of parcels around the Calderara Sottana contrada, and those form this range. 2024 followed one of the warmest, driest winters on record, but spring rain and a wet spell in late August brought the fruit through in good order, picked between 20 September and 18 October under cool conditions and wide day-to-night swings. Fourteen to sixteen months in 50-hectolitre French oak casks.
The producer
Bella-Colonna
View all Bella-Colonna winesBella-Colonna is Marco de Grazia's second act on Etna. Widely regarded as one of the pioneers of the modern Etna denomination, he founded Tenuta delle Terre Nere in 2002 and helped establish the mountain as one of Italy's most compelling wine regions. When he moved on from that estate he kept a selection of vineyard parcels around the celebrated Calderara Sottana contrada on Etna's northern slopes, and those parcels are what the Bella-Colonna range is built from.
The vineyards climb to 900 metres above sea level, which is extreme altitude for red wine anywhere in Italy, let alone Sicily. The soils are volcanic, black and free-draining, and many of the parcels still carry old bush-trained vines. On Etna the contrada system works much as the climat system does in Burgundy: individual named sites on the same slope produce recognisably different wines, and the range is deliberately built to show that, with each site vinified and bottled separately rather than blended away.
The grape is Nerello Mascalese, a late-ripening variety with pale colour, high acidity and fine tannins that has more in common with Pinot Noir or Nebbiolo than with anything else grown in the south. Fermentation runs at 28 to 30C, malolactic happens spontaneously, and the wines spend fourteen months in French oak barriques and tonneaux followed by a month in stainless steel before bottling.
