The Etna Job

Rescuing a Sicilian cru in the middle of the night

At four o'clock one morning in April 2012, a small tanker truck pulled up to what had been Ciro Biondi's winery on Sicily's Mount Etna and made off with more than 2,000 gallons of wine. The haul included the first two vintages—2010 and 2011—of a red single-vineyard cru from Biondi's ancestral vineyard known as Cisterna Fuori.

When Biondi learned the wine had been taken, he was relieved.

In fact, he had organized the whole furtive operation to retrieve barrels that had been stuck in the winery after a bitter split left him on the outs with his decade-long business partners.

"It was my wine," says Biondi, 55. A boyish grin crosses his face, and he shrugs with everything from his large shoulders to his polished, shaved crown. "And nobody was looking after it!"

Among the casualties of the company breakup were thousands of gallons of wine ruined by neglect. But Biondi was determined to save the cru from Cisterna Fuori—5 stunning acres of steeply terraced indigenous Nerello Mascalese and Nerello Cappuccio vineyards at the edge of a spent volcanic crater facing the Ionian Sea.

The wine was brought for cellaring to Trecastagni and the Biondi family's cramped, dusty cellars where generations of Biondis made wine, and where Ciro has relaunched his wine company with his British wife, Stephanie.

Fortunately for Etna wine lovers, Biondi's new middle-of-the-night cru may be among his best efforts yet. The biggest part of the recovered wine was released this spring as Ciro Biondi Etna Cisterna Fuori Contrada Ronzini 2011.

Biondi is one of the few Etna winegrowers with roots in fine wine. His family exported wines to the United States even before World War I. But following the death of Biondi's grandfather, the Biondis stopped bottling wine in 1960 and sold off their grapes in bulk.

Then in 1999, Biondi, a mid-career architect, decided to restore the family's wine legacy and its vineyards (some of which had survived phylloxera and remain planted without rootstock) on Etna's eastern slopes.

"The idea was not to waste the land, but to make it a garden as it had been," recalls Biondi.

Biondi partnered with a childhood friend to run the business side and an investor was brought in. But even as the wines sold around the world, the company continued to lose money. In Biondi's telling of events, too much was blown on excessive winery capacity, consultants and other business arrangements.

"It was impossible to run a company where you don't know how much money you have, and where the answer was always, 'Let's see tomorrow.'"

In the end, Sicilian tempers flared, and the partnership exploded like hot magma. But Biondi kept the vineyards he personally owned. In fact, the split forced him to focus on them: He now produces three single-vineyard crus—two reds and one white from vineyards owned by him and other family members.

Biondi's new wine company is back up to producing 1,600 cases a year. He ferments his wine in plastic vats and steel tanks under a temporary open shed below Cisterna Fuori. For finishing and aging, the wines are transported to his family's old cellars, which Biondi is renovating after decades of abandon.

For cash flow, Biondi raised about $35,000 from American wine-loving investors who agreed to be paid back in wine over three vintages. Biondi is drawing his own plans for a new winery that he hopes to start building in place of his temporary one next year, but he says his past experience has taught him some lessons.

One of those lessons is: "You don't need a big winery to make wine. You just need beautiful damn vineyards and a couple of vats and a pump."

Sometimes, in the Sicilian predawn, a truck also comes in handy.