The Exotic Vineyards of Passopisciaro

7 min read

Mount Etna is a beautiful place to be swallowed whole. As the van I was in drove up Via Guardiola toward the vineyards of Passopisciaro winery, it seemed as though the broom and fennel were encroaching upon the fringes of asphalt, and — if they didn’t see the blade soon — they’d consume the whole strip. The land is wind-beaten, has a soft color palette, and the summit of the volcano always looms over the scene, orchestrating the clouds or making ones of its own ashen design.

If this sounds like the last place in the world you’d want to practice viticulture, than you have very little in common with Andrea Franchetti, the founder of Passopisciaro and a pioneer in the internationalization of the volcano’s ancient vineyards. I wrote about Passopisciaro in 2020 when I interviewed his cousin Carlo Franchetti as the COVID-19 pandemic had all of us on lockdown.

Even though many of the vineyards were overgrown and rundown, [Andrea] was enthralled by their potential. An advocate for bold, richly concentrated wines in the style of Bordeaux, his work until that point had been entirely with international varieties. But the ancient vines of Nerello Mascalese offered something else: concentration of character …

“He went around asking people on Etna, ‘where do the best wines come from?’” Carlo recalled. “The beauty of being the first [outsider] on Etna at the time was that he could cherry-pick what he thought were the best vineyards.”

A year-and-a-half after I published the story, Andrea Franchetti died from cancer. He had retreated from the public eye to fight the illness, allowing Carlo to do much of the press relations on behalf of the estate. His long-time collaborator, Vincenzo Lo Mauro, took over as director.

A Druid Landscape

And now, four years after that interview — and nearly 10 years since I first tasted wines from the estate — I was about to visit Passopisciaro to photograph its strange, twisted vineyards and to taste its most recent vintage.

On the road to the winery, you are not only ensconced in broom, heather and wild weeds, but also surrounded by ribbons of lava flow, frozen in time. In 1947, a slow-moving river of Etna’s molten contents passed through this area, sparing some vineyards and incinerating and burying others. From a distance, it looks like melted candle wax pooled over the landscape, but upon closer inspection, it’s riddled with rough stones. These have been used for walls and terraces both out of necessity and, seemingly, just to do something with their ubiquity.

“I think they were initially built to make the land flatter and easier to work on,” Carlo Franchetti had told me. “But also on Etna, they had to dig out a lot of volcanic rock to plant these vineyards, and what do you do with the stone? You build walls.”

So the walls at Passopisciaro are not unusual at all, but their omnipresence lends their vineyards a rather druid look, particularly under an overcast sky.

Continuing a Legacy

Lo Mauro greeted us along with Lene Bucelli, Vini Franchetti’s head of marketing, who ably provided translation for our vineyard tour.

Lo Mauro and Franchetti were very close, and since taking over the estate after his friend and colleague’s death, he has done what he can to preserve Franchetti’s legacy and not alter the direction of the estate. “He was a great man,” Lo Mauro said.

Some of that legacy is stylistic: Franchetti’s version of Etna posits the question “can elegance be powerful?” To his mind, it could be, and he developed legions of fans with this vision … a vision Lo Mauro continues to oversee. All but one of the 10 Passopisciaro wines are categorized outside the Etna DOC as Terre Siciliane, in part because some of the single vineyards are outside the zone, and it’s just easier to keep them all grouped together. But also, these wines are more full-throttle, more structured than most Etna Rosso. They do seem different.

I am curious, and I would have liked to experiment with it, but I would have liked to have experimented with it together, with Andrea. Because of that, no, now I don’t want to do it.”
Vincenzo Lo Mauro
on Carricante

However, some of Lo Mauro’s reluctance to change the course of Passopisciaro is Franchetti’s legacy and his feeling of responsibility toward it. For instance, few things are more on trend right now than Carricante and Etna Bianco, and rightly so. However, Franchetti was never a fan of the spunky, high-yielding grape.

When I asked Lo Mauro why they make only Chardonnay, and not Carricante, he was candid: “Because Andrea didn’t like it, and I want to stay true to that.” He added, “Passopisciaro is something else. I am curious [about Carricante,] and I would have liked to experiment with it, but I would have liked to have experimented with it together, with Andrea. Because of that, no, now I don’t want to do it.”

Passopisciaro’s Vineyards

The estate is parceled across an expanse of Etna’s north slope, with the core holding at the winery actually comprising of two grapes that Andrea Franchetti, a Roman, deeply adored: Petit Verdot and Cesanese, a local variety of Lazio.

“He fell in love with these old plants,” Lene Bucelli told me. “He saw all of these different lava flows, different altitudes, and since he knew French wine very well, he also saw, in his mind, the map of Bourgogne.” Instead of monastic clos walls, he had volcanic lava flows. “He saw how [Etna] could be exactly the same,” Bucelli continued. “So he started keeping everything separate right away.”

We soon boarded the van and took a tour of the famed contrada vineyards — some of the first single-vineyard expressions of Etna in the modern era. Immediately below the winery, we stopped to view and discuss their prized Guardiola holding, which is vinified for the Contrada G Terre Siciliane.

“The important trait here is that no vineyard existed in this soil until we planted here,” Lo Mauro said through Bucelli’s translation. “The soil is full of organic material because it hasn’t been used before.”

We then drove uphill to the most evocatively named contrada, Sciaranuova — or new stream, a references to the age of the lava flow beneath it. How remarkable, I thought, that from a 17th century molten fire flow from the mountain — whose blackened wasteland was a geological yesterday — such verdant and abundant life could spring forth so soon.

But the real jewel vineyard — at least from the standpoint of marveling at the aesthetics of such a thing — is Passopisciaro’s terraces in Contrada Rampante, which fuels the Contrada R Terre Siciliane. The vineyard lies “upstream,” if you will, on the same frozen river of stone that Contrada Sciaranuova lies upon. Imagine the Roman Forum, but for every senator’s toga, replace it with a bush vine of Nerello Mascalese.

Residing at 1,000 meters above sea level (3,330 feet), it is among the highest vineyards in Sicily, and also one of the last to ripen because of it. Those long, drawn-out cycles in the vineyard can foster remarkable complexity in the grapeskins. Any Etna winemaker would clamor for this plot today.

We returned to the van as a light rain rolled in. Etna’s dynamics today would be climatic: a red-light/green-light of winds, an in-and-out of the clouds. Now it was time to taste, and to compare the nuances of site through a vision of powerful elegance.