Sardinia (Sardegna)

Sardinia is not really an Italian wine region. It is a fragment of a different landmass, farming a set of grapes that mostly arrived from Spain, using a vocabulary that is often neither Italian nor Spanish. Understanding it as a western Mediterranean island that happens to be administered from Rome explains far more than treating it as southern Italy.

The Landscape The second largest island in the Mediterranean is 14 per cent mountain, 68 per cent hill and rocky plateau, and 18 per cent flat, with an average altitude of about 330 metres. The Gennargentu is the high ground, topping out at Punta la Marmora at 1,834 metres. The only real plain is the Campidano, running from the Gulf of Oristano down to the Gulf of Cagliari. The island’s plateaus have their own names depending on what they are made of — giare or golei where they are granite or basalt, tacchi or tonneri where they are sandstone or limestone.

A Detached Microplate Between about 35 and 13 million years ago, as the African, Eurasian and North Atlantic plates ground against each other, a deep fracture opened and a microplate broke away carrying Sardinia, Corsica and the Balearics with it. Almost all the island’s mountains are built of very old rock, going back to the Caledonian orogeny at the start of the Palaeozoic, when the first core of the Sulcis formed before emerging fully alongside Corsica during the Hercynian. The practical result is enormous lithological variety in a small area — and the fact that Gallura’s Vermentino grows on Hercynian granite roughly 300 million years old.

Three Thousand Years It was long assumed that the Phoenicians brought the vine to Sardinia, and there is no documentary evidence for it whatsoever. Then rock-cut storage wells at Cabras were found to contain Vitis vinifera seeds. Carbon dating by the University of Cagliari’s Centre for the Conservation of Biodiversity, under Professor Gianluigi Bacchetta, put them at around 3,000 years old — squarely within the Nuragic civilisation, which ran from the eighteenth century BC until Roman colonisation in 238 BC. Sardinians were growing grapes long before either the Phoenicians or the Romans arrived to take credit.

Grape by Ground Cannonau grows on the basalts around Dorgali, the granite of Nuoro and Oliena, and the granite and metamorphic soils of the Ogliastra; it tolerates arid, gravelly ground but does best where it is well exposed and ventilated. Carignano del Sulcis comes off Oligo-Miocene rhyolitic ignimbrites and the sands of Sant’Antioco. Vermentino belongs to Gallura, and finds its best expression between Olbia and Oschiri on eluvial granite soils. Vernaccia di Oristano runs along the Tirso to its mouth. Monica prefers the warm calcareous-siliceous ground around Cagliari, and Nuragus the marly hills.

The Grapes Cannonau is Grenache, and Sardinians have argued since the 1990s that it originated here rather than in Spain. Carignano is Cariñena, or more properly Mazuelo. Bovale comes in two forms, the Sardo and the Grande, and their identities are among the most contested on the island. Monica, Nuragus, Nasco, Semidano, Girò and Torbato fill out a list that is unusually long for the acreage. Vermentino is the great white, with its own DOCG in Gallura, and Vernaccia di Oristano and Malvasia di Bosa are the island’s two flor-aged oxidative wines — fermented dry and left for years in part-filled casks under a film of yeast, unfortified.

The Critical Take Cannonau’s commercial fortunes have been transformed less by quality than by a health story — the island’s longevity statistics and the wine’s polyphenol content — and a good deal of ordinary Cannonau now sells on that. The genuinely great wines here are elsewhere: Carignano del Sulcis from old bush vines on sand, Vermentino di Gallura off granite, and above all Vernaccia di Oristano, which is one of the most remarkable wines in Italy and one of the least drunk. It takes years, cannot be hurried, and has almost no market. Malvasia di Bosa is in the same position. If either disappears it will be for commercial reasons alone.

At the Table Porceddu, suckling pig roasted on a spit; culurgiones stuffed with potato and mint; bottarga grated over pasta; pane carasau; pecorino sardo at every age; and myrtle liqueur afterwards. Cannonau with the porceddu is the island’s own answer and a correct one.

Where to Start Vermentino di Gallura, then Carignano del Sulcis from old vines. Then find a bottle of Vernaccia di Oristano and give it the attention it asks for.