Calabretta Etna Rosso Doc 2002 750ml

Winery: Calabretta

Region: Sicily

There are few wine regions in the world with such an ideal terroir and climate for viticulture as that found on Sicily. This Italian island has been an important center for wine production for several thousand years, with experts claiming that the ancient Greeks were the first to bring wine-making techniques to the island. The almost year-round sunshine and rich, fertile volcanic soil of Sicily makes the vintner's jobs very easy, and grapevines thrive and flourish more or less everywhere on the island. Sicily is widely renowned for its excellent sweet dessert wines, and for fortified wines such as Marsala, yet the popularity of their dry red and white produce is ever rising, thanks to their drinkability and fantastic fruit flavors which really manage to put across the sunny, almost tropical nature of the island they are grown on.

Country: Italy

For several decades in the mid to late twentieth century, Italy's reputation for quality wines took a fairly serious blow. This was brought about partly due to lack of regulation in certain regions, and too much regulation in others. This led to several wineries in the beautiful and highly fertile region of Tuscany making the bold move to work outside of the law, which they saw as responsible for the drop in quality in Tuscan wines. They believed that they had the expertise and the generations of experience necessary with which to make truly excellent, world class wines, and set about doing just that. These 'Super Tuscans', as they came to be known, quickly inspired the rest of Italy to improve their produce, and now, Italian wine producers in the twenty-first century are widely recognised to be amongst the best in the world. Regulation and law began to change, and wine drinkers across the globe woke up to the outstanding wines coming out of Italy, which are continuing to improve and impress to this day.