Sardegna in wine

The seeds of domesticated grapes found in Cabras, on Sardinia’s west coast, have been carbon-dated 3,000 years.

This discovery proves that neither the Phoenicians nor the Romans were the first to cultivate grapes or make wine here.

Instead – amazingly – it puts winemaking culture even further back than the island’s ‘Nuragic’ civilisations.

(📸 Carlo Pelagalli)

The Basilian monks who arrived in 534 AD made wine and divided the island into four autonomous Giudicati, or kingdoms.  The influence of this administrative division was felt in the island’s small wine industry, and beyond, for the next thousand years.

There followed an Arab incursion which was first documented in 705. The Arabs retained the Giudicati organisation and continued to manage the island efficiently. One pecularity of Sardinian cuisine is that it is not fish-centric, as one might expect. This is because coastal communities were inclined to be sacked by Arab raiding parties, so the population settled inland.

The Sardinian flag, pictured, shows the Quattro Mori or ‘four moors’. (Corsica, similarly, has a Moor’s head on its flag.)

The rising Maritime Republics – notably Pisa and Genova – also kept this effective administrative system, and as a result were able to increase grapevine cultivation. The picture of a Genovese ship is from the fourteenth century.

Spain entered the picture in 1297, bringing the northwest of the island into its sphere of influence. Demonstrating how its winemaking fortunes had changed, in 1329 the Aragonese imposed export duties on Sardinian fine wine. As well as quantity and quality, the Spanish also added to the number of varieties of grapevine in commercial production on the island.

The Giudicati continued their important work, bolstered by tighter laws around production methods and quality. Phylloxera destroyed the island’s crop, and it was only in the 1950s that production started to pick up.

Sardinian wine is at the start of a golden phase of growth in prestige and quality. Yields are kept lower to improve the concentration of flavours and cellars benefit from outside investment.

The enologist Giacomo Tachis was influential in this. From the 1960s he visited the island to source fruit to use as vino da taglio, ‘cutting wine’, to boost the colour and concentration of wines produced by his famous wineries such as Tenuta San Guido (of Sassicaia fame).

These wineries include Agricola Punica (📸 Agricola Punica).

In terms of style, the acidic granite rocks of Gallura (shown at Tenuta Matteu in the header picture) make a rich, mellow, heady Vermentino, by comparison to that grape’s Ligurian and Tuscan counterparts. Vermentino di Gallura is the island’s only DOCG.

Cannonau (aka Grenache – pictured) does well on the basalt of Dorgali and the granite of Ogliastra.

In the south, Carignano is making waves with the high quality, rich and complex Carignano del Sulcis DOC.

Other red grapes include Monica, Nuragus and Bovale Sardo. Indegenous whites include Nasco, Malvasia and Moscato, all of which are often vinified sweet or even liquoroso.

Perhaps most special of all, however, are the extraordinary, age-worthy, oxidised, sherry-like wines of Vernaccia di Oristano DOC. (The name is a historical anomaly – the grape is not in fact related to the Vernaccia of Tuscany.)