Sardinia

An island that has been Italian for about three hundred years, and making wine for at least three thousand

I ran a Sardinian tasting a couple of years ago, and it remains one of my favourite workshops I have done. Partly because the wines were excellent. Mostly because almost nobody in the room had tried any of them.

Sardinia is the second largest island in the Mediterranean, which has been the governing fact of its history. Anyone with a fleet has had a go at it. Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Pisans, Genoese, Aragonese, Spanish, and only in the eighteenth century did it pass to the House of Savoy and become, eventually, Italian.

Every one of them left something behind, and a surprising amount of it is in the vineyard. The Aragonese brought grape varieties and techniques still in use today. Byzantine monks planted vines around their monasteries. The Phoenicians, traders before they were anything else, appear to have been the ones who really got it going.

So if Sardinian wine doesn’t taste like the mainland, there is no particular reason why it should.

A short history, with one very good law

At the Nuraghe Arrubiu, at Orroli, archaeologists have found pressing vats, press bases and vessels from the Roman imperial period, a working winery, in other words. Grape seeds from the same layers match native varieties still grown on the island today.

By the Middle Ages the Sardinians were taking wine seriously enough to legislate about it. The Carta de Logu, the legal code promulgated by Eleonora of Arborea at the end of the fourteenth century, set out penalties for anyone who uprooted or set fire to someone else’s vineyard. Usually a fine. In the worst cases, the loss of the right hand.

A century earlier, the statutes of Sassari had already established that nobody could plant new vines except to replace what they had pulled out. Which is, essentially, the modern EU planting rights system, arrived at in the 1200s by people who had simply worked out that unlimited planting ends badly.

Then phylloxera. Sardinia had around 80,000 hectares of specialised vineyard before it arrived; today it has roughly a third of that. The recovery, when it came, went in the wrong direction, quantity over quality, dark alcoholic reds shipped off to strengthen other people’s wine. That only really turned around in the last thirty years, which is why Sardinian wine is interesting now rather than forty years ago.

The reds

Cannonau is the island’s most planted red and its most recognisable name, concentrated overwhelmingly in the province of Nuoro. It is genetically Grenache, which the wine world generally takes to mean it arrived with the Spanish. Sardinians point to the archaeology and argue it went the other way. Comparisons have also been drawn to Canonazo, near Seville, and to Granaxo in Aragon. The evidence has not settled the matter and probably won’t, which in Italian wine is the normal state of affairs.

The DOC covers the whole island, with three subzones: Oliena, which may also be labelled Nepente di Oliena, one of the better wine names anywhere, Jerzu, and Capo Ferrato. The Classico wines come from Nuoro and Ogliastra and are the ones worth hunting down.

The one I poured was Mamuthone, from Giuseppe Sedilesu at Mamoiada. Giuseppe started in the 1970s with a single hectare and sold his wine in bulk; the estate is fifteen hectares now, run since 2000 by his children Antonietta, Francesco and Salvatore. The vines are low bush trained at 650 metres, often on serious slopes, worked by hand and occasionally with an ox drawn cart. Fermentation is spontaneous, nothing is filtered, and the wine ages in concrete and large oak. The name comes from the masked figures of the Mamoiada carnival, who process through the village in black sheepskins under a weight of cowbells, and the mask is drawn on the label. It made the point about Cannonau better than anything I could have said.

Carignano is Carignan, most likely brought by the Phoenicians who founded Sulci on Sant’Antioco. Almost all of it grows in the Sulcis, in the south west, where it tolerates salt laden sea wind better than most vines. The soil there is sand, and phylloxera cannot travel through sand, which is why a good deal of Sulcis Carignano still grows ungrafted, on its own roots, the way every vine in Europe grew before 1863.

Carignano del Sulcis is, to my mind, the most underrated red on the island. We drank Sella & Mosca’s Terre Rare. Sella & Mosca is worth a note of its own: founded in 1899 near Alghero by two Piedmontese, an engineer and a lawyer, who bought fifteen hectares, spent their first years clearing sandstone boulders off the land, and built what is now among the largest estates in Europe. Their trademark is an Egyptian relief of five men treading grapes with sticks, which is either magnificent or absurd and I have never quite decided which.

Bovale needs a paragraph of its own, because there are two of them. Bovale sardo, known locally as Muristellu, is genuinely native. Bovale grande, also called Bovale di Spagna, arrived from Iberia around 1300. Genetic testing has confirmed they are separate varieties, which took rather longer than you might expect. Bovale sardo is at its best in Mandrolisai, in the Nuoro hills, blended with Cannonau and Monica, a wine that ages well and that almost nobody outside Sardinia has heard of.

Monica may have arrived with Camaldolese monks in the eleventh century, which would explain the name, or during Spanish rule, in parts of the island it is still called Monica di Spagna. Softer and more approachable than the others, and the one I would open on a weeknight. We drank Iselis, the Monica di Sardegna Superiore from Argiolas at Serdiana, which shows how much more the grape can do than its reputation suggests.

Cagnulari grows in a small pocket north west of Sassari, around Usini and Alghero. It came very close to disappearing altogether and was pulled back by a handful of local growers who could see what it was capable of. Structured, dark fruited, and worth their trouble.

The whites

Vermentino is the island’s signature white and holds Sardinia’s only DOCG, Vermentino di Gallura, in the granite country of the north east. The granite is the whole point, it gives the wine a saline, mineral edge and the almond note the Gallurese are rightly proud of. There is also a late harvest Vendemmia Tardiva style, richer and gold toned, which surprises people who think of Vermentino purely as a seafood wine.

We tasted Primo, the Gallura Superiore from Cantina Piero Mancini near Olbia. Piero Mancini was a dentist who started planting vines in the 1960s because he loved wine, and only formally founded the winery in 1989; his wife and three children run it now, across 120 hectares of granite between 100 and 500 metres. It did what good Gallura Vermentino does: arrived looking like a simple white and turned out not to be.

Nuragus is one of the oldest white varieties on the island, probably Phoenician, and for a long time the most planted. It is hardy, adaptable and extremely generous, the permitted yields are enormous, which tells you most of what you need to know about its reputation. Grown properly and picked at sensible volumes it makes a fresh, saline, thoroughly pleasant white. It has spent decades being judged by its worst examples, which is why I put Santadi’s Pedraia on the table and said nothing until people had tried it.

Semidano was traditionally blended in to soften Nuragus, then largely abandoned after phylloxera in favour of easier varieties. It survives almost entirely around Mogoro, in Oristano province, and makes a fine, long lived white with real texture.

Torbato belongs to the wider Malvasia family and reached Sardinia under Spanish rule, where the Aragonese court thought highly enough of it to import it. It now grows on a very small area around Alghero, a town that still feels Catalan, because it is, and makes both still and sparkling wines. Sella & Mosca deserve the credit for keeping it alive.

The wines that behave like sherry

This is the part of Sardinia I find most remarkable, and the part almost nobody knows.

Vernaccia di Oristano was the island’s first DOC, in 1971. The casks, chestnut or oak, are filled only to about 90%, leaving a deliberate gap for air, and a living veil of yeast forms across the surface of the wine and slowly changes it over years. This is the same process, called flor, that gives sherry its character. Unlike sherry, though, Vernaccia is not fortified. It reaches its considerable strength on its own.

The Sardinians even have a method for drawing the wine off without disturbing the veil: a small hole is made in the face of the barrel below the wine line, a length of cane inserted to draw off what is needed, and the hole plugged afterwards with hemp. It is called spiseddadura, and there is a festival built around it where people take turns tapping the barrels. I find this an entirely reasonable thing to celebrate.

The grape’s name is doing more work than it appears to. It comes from the Latin for local, which is why unrelated “Vernaccias” turn up all over Italy, but it carries a sense of spring and renewal too, and in Oristano it describes the ageing as much as the grape.

The grape also has a second life. Quartomoro, at Arborea in the same province, make a skin contact Vernaccia called Sulle Bucce, no yeast veil, no years in cask, just the grape vinified young and left on its skins. Piero Cella founded Quartomoro in 2011 and calls it a cantina didattica, a teaching winery: fifteen hectares spread across wildly different Sardinian soils, planted to something like a dozen native varieties, essentially as an experiment in what the island can do. I poured the Sulle Bucce next to the traditional style and the room found it hard to believe they had come from the same grape.

Malvasia di Bosa is made the same way as Vernaccia, under its own veil of yeast, in the Planargia hills, from a tiny appellation with permitted yields so low they read like a misprint. Malvasia takes its name from Monemvasia, the Greek port that shipped the wine around the Mediterranean; in Sardinian dialect it is Alvarega, meaning white Greek, which rather confirms the story.

Both are made in small quantities by very few people. If you see either, buy it.

The sweet ones

Nasco takes its name from the Latin for musk, which is exactly right when the wine has a few years on it. It was shown at the Vienna Universal Exposition in 1873 and judged one of Sardinia’s finest. Girò is a dark, sweet red from the south, one of very few Italian wines that can reasonably be set alongside Port or Madeira. Moscato the Romans called vitis apiana, the vine of the bees, because the bees got there first. The sparkling versions from the granite around Tempio are lovely.

A note on Giacomo Tachis

One thread runs through half the bottles on my table that evening, and it belongs to a Piedmontese oenologist.

Giacomo Tachis made his name in Tuscany, where he was behind Sassicaia and Tignanello, the wines that rewrote what Italy could sell to the world. He spent much of his later career in Sardinia. From the mid 1980s he worked with Santadi, the Sulcis co-operative, on the wine that became Terre Brune, the first Sardinian red aged in barrique. He worked with Argiolas on Turriga. Piero Cella of Quartomoro learned under him at Santadi.

I find this quietly remarkable. The man who could have spent his last decades anywhere chose an island that most of the wine trade had written off, and a good deal of what makes Sardinian wine worth drinking now runs back through him.

The longevity question

Which brings us to the thing most people know about Sardinia without knowing it is Sardinia.

The mountain villages of the Nuoro area were the first Blue Zone ever identified, a cluster of communities with roughly ten times as many centenarians per head as the United States, and the longest living people recorded anywhere. Cannonau always features in the coverage, on the grounds that it carries unusually high levels of flavonoids.

Antonio Argiolas, who planted the family’s first vines at Serdiana, died at 102. His family named a wine Senes in honour of the island’s centenarians, and made a red passito called Antonio 100 for his hundredth birthday. So the Sardinians are perfectly aware of all this, and rather more graceful about it than the wellness industry has been.

Still, I would love to tell you that drinking Cannonau makes you live to a hundred. What the research actually describes is a population that eats vegetables, beans and whole grains, keeps meat for Sundays, stays close to family, and, the part that gets far less attention than the wine, walks about five miles a day up and down mountains, because they are shepherds.

The wine is part of the picture. It is not the whole picture, and it is easily the most appealing part to copy without the rest.

Drink Cannonau because it is very good.

Most of the wine I have written about here comes from estates large enough to reach you. But the wines that taste most like Sardinia often come from people working a hectare or two of old bush vines: Dettori at Sennori, Panevino at Nurri, Paddeu at Mamoiada, Pusole at Lotzorai, Nero Miniera at Carbonia, and Giovanni Battista Columbu at Bosa, who is among the last making Malvasia the traditional way.

Sardinia spent three thousand years being invaded by people who wanted the harbours. It held on to the vines regardless.

Cin Cin!