This investment banker is now making wines at Mount Etna, Europe’s highest volcano

When Giuseppe Benanti first crafted wines from the foothills of Mount Etna in Sicily, he didn’t envision that one day, Etna wines would garner a stellar worldwide reputation. He aspired to simply emulate the best wines from Piedmont and Burgundy, using indigenous Etnean grapes.
“In the ‘80s and ‘90s, nobody cared about Etna wines, not even the local people,” recalled Salvino Benanti, sitting across me on the expansive dining table at his family estate in Viagrande, Sicily. Guiseppe Benanti died last year, leaving his family legacy and estate in the hands of his twin sons, Salvino and Antonio.
The stone villa, with panoramic views of Mount Etna, Europe’s most active volcano, dates back to the 1700s. This is their hospitality hub, where the Benanti’s guests are received at the majestic grounds and shown to the heritage palmento, an ancient stone building where grapes were crushed in the olden days, before being invited into the newly renovated dining room to taste the wines.
“My father was experimenting at the time”, he continued, detailing how the senior Benanti hedged his bets in the 1980s by developing a portfolio of wines from Etnean and international grapes like chardonnay to appeal to a wider audience. His strategy was to open markets off the back of the hero international grapes and push Etna wines as an add-on.
“Today, it seems like quite a crazy strategy, but we’re judging with hindsight. It’s only in the last 20 years that the market has opened up to Etna,” Salvino surmised.
THE WINE LOWDOWN
Etna wines refer to wines made from native Etnean grapes. Nerello mascale is the main red grape of the region, seconded by its cousin, nerello cappuccio. An Etna rosso could be a 100 per cent nerello mascale or a blend of the two. The wines are light-coloured, deeply mineralic and hauntingly beautiful. An Etna Bianco, on the other hand, is crafted mainly from carricante grape, and in its finest form, it’s a chiselled wine that is energetic and has an herbal, saline finish.
We are on Sicily’s eastern coast, where the 3,368m-high Mount Etna is revered and omnipresent. The grapes grow in a composite of vineyards splayed on the foothills and slopes of Mount Etna, sitting at varied heights between 400m and 1,000m. Soils are a mosaic of decomposed lava collected over thousands of years and change from rocky to sandy based on which vineyard you’re at.
The volcano is active, and its four craters frequently spurt black-grey ash, as recently as July 2024, over the vineyards and nearby town of Catania, covering them in lapilli, a micro conical and porous pomace-like sand. Rich in mineral components like silica, iron, magnesium and potassium, the ash enriches the existing soils and creates variations that lend to differences in terroir.
“It is difficult to say how the soil changes after every eruption,” Salvino explained. “Eruptions are so frequent and are so much a part of our everyday life that we do not really analyse them in detail every time. What the volcano usually spills are ashes and sand.”
With vineyards on every slope of Mount Etna, Benanti is in prime position to comment on terroir differences exhibited on three winemaking slopes – the north, east, and south- and 133 single vineyards called contradas. “The North is cooler and rainier than the South, but the East slope is even rainier and quite humid. The South can be subdivided into South-East, quite Mediterranean, and Southwest, which shows elements of Continentality (huge diurnal range).” The varying high altitudes, temperatures and significant day-night temperature variance impart a freshness and elegance in the wines, even when young.
Earlier, we explored the single vineyard of Rinazzo in Milo, a town known for producing Etna Bianco Superiore, the highest tier of white wines. “These represent 1 per cent of Etna’s production, whereas regular Biancos account for roughly 40 per cent. These figures alone indicate that Bianco Superiore is a rare, more prestigious wine,” explained Salvino.
The quality is attributed to the richer soils and the microclimate of the eastern slopes of Etna, where vineyards (terraced with dry lava stone to combat soil erosion) benefit from cool breezes of the Ionian Sea, which brings salinity of the wines.
Today, Etna Rosso and Etna Bianco feature on every progressive wine list, spurred by a global interest in native Italian grapes and volcanic wines.
THE SECOND WAVE
When Antonio and Salvino Benanti took over the winery in 2012, they inadvertently triggered the second wave of growth. The brothers, educated in Geneva and ex-London investment bankers, joined the business only to methodically cull and consolidate their father’s portfolio to its core: Etna grapes. The non-Etna vineyards and grapes were promptly sold, and a new hierarchy was created over time. Now, the 16 or so wines are segmented across different tiers, with the highest tiers occupied by icons, including the renowned Pietra Marina Etna Bianco Superiore, which holds a legendary reputation. Tasting through the tiers and various contradas, the terroir differences become apparent, as does the intensity of Etna Rosso Serra della Contessa 2015, a wine extracted from 100-year-old pre-phylloxera vines (Etna vineyards beyond 600m were untouched by the aphid phylloxera infestation of 1800s and some of these old vines still live on).
The region has even attracted the attention of heavy weight Piedmont (Barolo) producers like Angela Gaia to its slopes. “People who raise the bar and attract the attention of wine lovers are definitely welcome. They are adding value to the region, so we’re happy,” he said, intensely aware that the investment from known producers like Gaia, Planeta, Donnafugata has invariably resulted in increased land prices.
An increase in global demand has also translated into pressure to expand the Etna DOC boundaries to accommodate either the western slopes or higher altitudes. The western slopes are inhospitable to vines, said Salvino, however, there’s some give in the northern slopes: “Good wines from Nerello Mascalese are already being made at higher elevations in the Randazzo area, so we would simply be “ratifying” something which already exists.”
“In Italy, there’s a saying: Te la canti e te la suoni, meaning you’re looking inwards, and you don’t know what’s happening beyond the boundaries of your immediate surroundings,” he said. Not wanting to fall victim to an insular approach, much of their ongoing work is dedicated towards research and development, exploring yeast, soils and climate studies in partnership with state universities. The local wine consortium, Salvino says, is young and development work must be taken on by wineries if we are to continue our progress.
According to him, the last 15 years have been quite profitable. The winery produces 250,000 bottles, and 80 per cent of these are exported around the world, including Singapore. “We sell out by allocation, so we do not have any worries about the market,” he said comfortably.
But this is the result of 36 years of hard work. “There are a lot of people who started producing wine on Etna (currently, there are 209 producers, producing approximately 5.5 million bottles of wine), and they think that writing these four letters on the label will give them immediate notoriety and wealth. But everybody knows that wine takes time.”