Grillo

Grillo is a Sicilian white with two distinct careers, and the older one is as the principal grape of Marsala. DNA analysis has established it as a natural crossing of Catarratto and Zibibbo, which places its origins firmly in western Sicily and probably in the nineteenth century — considerably more recent than its status as a traditional variety suggests.

Marsala was created in the 1770s by English merchants who fortified Sicilian wine so it would survive the voyage home, in direct imitation of Madeira and sherry. Grillo suited the purpose because it accumulates high sugar and resists oxidation, and the resulting wine — aged in a solera, in dry, semi-sweet and sweet styles — was for a century one of the most commercially important fortified wines in Europe. Its long decline was the result of industrial overproduction and the invention of cooking Marsala, which destroyed the category's reputation. A handful of producers still make the serious version and it deserves far more attention than it gets.

The grape's second career is as a dry, unfortified white, and this is where most Grillo now goes. Picked earlier and fermented cool, it makes a crisp, aromatic wine with lemon, green apple, white peach and a herbal, faintly saline finish. It has good natural acidity for a hot climate and enough body to take lees ageing or a light touch of oak.

That revival has been one of the successes of modern Sicilian wine, and plantings have risen sharply since the 1990s.