Now this is just the sort of red wine for drinking in any weather, even the hottest, both with and without food. It’s made from nothing but Nero d’Avola, the richly fruity, cherry-flavoured red wine grape that has shot from obscurity to being Sicily’s big success story in just a handful of years. This lovely wine has not seen wood, and is just a lovely mouthful of unfiltered fruit that if full-bodied and serious but totally immediate and ready to drink.
The Melia brothers Giuseppe and Vincenzo are based in western Sicily, old Marsala country where white grapes are much, much more common than red. But they clearly know how to make red. They are still building up a business of their own but are clearly well on the way with, I’m told, one of those hotly disputed tre bicchiere awards for a more complex version of this wine. Douglas Wregg of the UK importer Caves de Pyrene tells me sternly “but this is a truer style”. It certainly suits me.
It costs about £9 in the UK from either Caves de Pyrene’s retail store near Guildford or £9.99 from Philglas & Swiggot (see the directory for more details of this small retail group around London) and is $14.99 from Mad Wine in Seattle. Other US stockists, not listed for some reason by www.winesearcher.com and the link above include Italian Wine Merchants of New York. And the wine is also available in Switzerland for about 18 Swiss francs (we don’t mention this currency often on this site…)
Happy drinking. This is a happy wine, and 'only' 13.5 per cent alcohol according to the rather zappy modern label.