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The Grillo Grape-Nectar of the Emperors

April 30th, 2008

In Vino Veritas! A couple of years ago, I stumbled on an interesting discovery.  While surfing the Internet with my friend, we did a Google search for Grillo and wine.  I am a wine fan and I was going through a phase of intensely reading and studying about wine.  The results of that search were astonishing.  Little did I know that there was a Grillo wine.  Grillo being my last name, I was startled and completely fascinated.

It was not just a bottle named Grillo, a wine making family or a vineyard.  It was the actual name of a grape.  The fruit of the vine itself.  The Grillo grape is an indigenous grape of Sicily and it goes back thousands of years.  Upon further study, I found out that Grillo is one of the essential grapes in the making of Marsala wine.  Marsala is the most famous wine in Sicily and in its heyday rivaled the best Port and Sherry of Europe.  It is a fortified wine with an alcohol content of 20%. Most people are familiar with this fortified wine from the classic dishes such as Chicken or Veal Marsala.  Marsala consists of a combination of three basic grapes.  Grillo, Catarratto and Inzolia grapes are blended to make this famous wine. In recent years, vinters are making and refining bottles of 100% Grillo grape.  In conjunction with modern technology and a rising Sicilian wine industry, Grillo is starting to shine solo.  Just imagine, every dish of Veal Marsala contains some Grillo grape!

Among its importance in making Marsala, the Grillo grape is also used in a wide variety of blends.  Blending wines has been a tradition of the Sicilian wine industry for millennia.  One of it most famous combinations is Mamertino.  There are several different names that are associated with this particular wine. Location is established with the city of origin.  For example, you would have Mamertino di Messina or Mamertino di Milazzo. Julius Caesar had a great affinity for the taste of Grillo wine.  Julius Caesar preferred the Mamertino which contained the most Grillo. To read an interesting article that discusses Caesar’s Grillo wine preference, click here.  Here is an excerpt from www.biovinivasari.it describing the history of this ancient fruit.  To visit a blog about the Mamertino wine click here.

“The Grillo grape gives Mamertino white wine its distinctive taste.  This is a wine which was recorded as far back as Roman times. There are copious records on Marmetino dating back to 289 BC. Mamertino was planted in the area of Milazzo and the surrounding hills in the neighbourhood of the communes of Santa Lucia del Mela and Meri’. It was described as: ”a praiseworthy grape variety for the production of a praiseworthy wine”.  A warm, generous and highly drinkable wine,it was offered to the followers of Julius Ceasar at banquets including the celebrations for his third consulship, and was mentioned in ”The Gallic Wars”.  The noble and historic origins of Mamertino, passed down by word of mounth on the land from which it came, indicate a wine which was showered with honors, prized and aristocratic that, furthermore, towered over its contemporaries in ancient and modern times. Strabone, the revered Roman geographer counted the Mamertino among the best wines of the time and Pliny placed it in fourth place in his classification of 195 wines, while the Frenchman Andrè Tehernia, in his book, ” The wine of Roman Italy ” described Mamertino as ” the fourth grand cru classé”.

There has been a resurgence in recent years of bringing back the ancient grape varietals of Sicily.  For more information on this revival click here. To learn more about the Sicilian wine industry click here .  The painting below is Caravaggio’s “Bacchus”.  It dates from around 1593 and hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.  For more information on this famous painting click here.

Entry Filed under: Wine