Terre di Vita Libellula Nero d Avola 2025
£9.75
The wine
Deep ruby red, with an ample bouquet of red brambly fruit, sour cherry and a delicate hint of spice. The palate reflects the nose beautifully, with smooth enveloping tannins giving real structure through to a fruity finish.
Nero d'Avola is Sicily's great red grape, named for the town of Avola in the south-east. Thick-skinned and late-ripening, it gives deep colour and dark cherry fruit with a firm acidic spine that keeps it from turning jammy in the heat. Made unoaked here for immediate drinking.
The producer
Terre di Vita
View all Terre di Vita winesTerre di Vita is a Sicilian range built on the island's two most important native grapes, Grillo for white and Nero d'Avola for red. Libellula, the range name, means dragonfly.
Sicily has been transformed over the past thirty years. For most of the twentieth century it produced enormous volumes of anonymous blending wine shipped north, and the change came when growers recognised what their own varieties could do. Grillo is a nineteenth-century Sicilian crossing of Catarratto and Muscat of Alexandria, created for Marsala and now the island's finest dry white. Nero d'Avola is named for the town in the south-east and gives dark cherry fruit with a firm acidic spine.
The island's hot, dry, ventilated climate makes organic growing far easier than in northern Europe, and Sicily now has more organic vineyard than any other Italian region.
