I am at Idda, the winery joint venture between Gaja and Graci on the southerly slopes of Sicily’s Mount Etna, pondering a question that has burned for years in Etna’s new-wave wine scene. Will the greatest wines of Etna be red or white?
Angelo Gaja and family are best known for elite red wines from Piedmont and Tuscany that Italians love to call “iconic.” (I’d define that as distinctive, complex, groundbreaking and ageworthy.) Graci has focused his 20 vintages on Etna mostly on notable Nerello Mascalese–based reds and a pair of Carricante whites—all from the mountain’s cooler north face.
Here with me—tasting vintages of Idda’s sole red and sole white wine in its sleek, year-old winery—are Alberto Aiello Graci, 49, and Gaia Gaja, 45, the eldest of Angelo’s winemaking progeny.
So, what will Etna’s most iconic wines look like?
“White,” Gaia says. No hesitation there.
What Can Carricante Achieve?
Idda was founded eight years ago to focus on Carricante, a local white variety known for its minerality, grown on Etna’s hot, dry southwestern and southern faces. The winery now produces about 1,700 cases of Etna Rosso and more than 4,000 cases of Sicilia Bianco (labeled that way because some of the vineyards fall outside the boundaries of the Etna DOC). Compared with many other well-made Etna whites, Idda’s Sicilia Bianco is more structured and expressively spicy—a style Graci calls “Mediterranean.”
The timing of the project has coincided with a dramatic boom in Etna whites. In 2018, Etna whites (dominated by or exclusively made from Carricante) represented only half the volume of Etna’s red-wine production. Now the whites are nearly equal in volume to the reds.
This growth may be more than a trend among consumers. Great Italian whites like Carricante seem to be finally getting the respect they deserve along the full wine spectrum—from producers and enologists to wine lovers.
Idda’s Etna red, fermented and aged for two years in a combination of oak casks and cement tanks, is not a groundbreaking wine, tending to be straightforward and juicy. “Here maybe Nerello doesn’t have that transparency, that earthiness, but it’s so enjoyable,” Gaia says. “And it has a sense of place that is very strong.”
However, with its white wine—aged 12 months in a combination of steel tanks and oak casks—Idda is carving out an identity by showcasing a different style and side of Etna.
“My idea of Carricante was of a white that has fantastic freshness, salty notes and a smokiness that comes from the volcano. These were the three things that I liked when I was drinking a Carricante,” Gaia says. “Thanks to Alberto, we’ve been tasting a lot because we want to see what other producers make, trying strategically, philosophically, to understand what our place is, what is missing.”
“What I’ve learned is that there are a lot of different types of Carricante, and that I’d never considered the generosity of this variety,” she adds. “And our Carricante, especially with the 2023 vintage [the newest release], can have a lot of taste, richness and a lot of perfume.”
Carricante also has a special “it” factor for aging. By that, I don’t mean the ability to survive in the cellar even after the bottle labels flake off, but the rare potential to reveal new, deeper flavors and aromas with time.
The benchmark for such Etna whites is Benanti’s Pietramarina Etna Bianco Superiore (now known as Pietra Marina), sourced from old vines in Milo in the southeast corner of Etna and first produced in 1991. After 10 or 20 years, some of the vintages I’ve tasted become stunningly more intense in minerality, spiciness and evolved fruit flavors.
Idda, of course, is a young project. Time, literally, will tell its story.
“We always believed in the potential of making refined whites, even in a red region,” says Gaia. “Now, in the last 10 to 15, years, it’s the southern half of Italy that woke up with some of the most interesting white wines—like Fiano, Verdicchio and Carricante—that we really like and we think have great aging potential.”
“Among those three, the focus became Carricante because of this special nature on Etna, because of the altitude, because of the late ripening,” she continues. “So betting on the future, we think this [grape variety] is the one.”
What's Next for Idda?
Moving into its new winery last year and hiring young Sicilian enologist Antonio La Fata has allowed Idda the time and room to experiment with the future.
“We are exploring, and we will see if it makes sense to take one vineyard of Carricante and bottle it separately,” says Graci. “But that must come from the vineyard.”
Moving forward, the partners will continue exploring Etna terroirs; in 2026, they plan to replant an abandoned 12-acre vineyard on the west side of the mountain to Carricante. The site sits at an elevation of about 3,000 feet near Bronte, Italy’s most famous terroir for pistachios and an area that has few vineyards.
“Sicily is such a lucky region. There are so many flavors, an immensity of taste and a kind of effortless beauty,” Gaia says. “Even the colors here are more intense. When I came here in spring, it was like I was seeing yellow, green and red for the first time. It’s this light and this land.”
For Part 1 of Robert Camuto’s reporting on Graci and Gaja’s Idda project, read his Nov. 5, 2024, column A Match Made on Mount Etna.
