Nero d'Avola

Nero d'Avola is Sicily's flagship red grape and the most important indigenous black variety of the island: a sun-loving, late-ripening vine that yields deeply coloured, full-bodied reds built on ripe black cherry and plum, medium-to-high tannin, soft-to-medium acidity and a warm, sometimes peppery, liquorice-tinged depth. Long used as a blending grape to bolster paler northern reds, it has been reborn since the 1990s as a serious varietal wine — generous and fruit-forward in its everyday guise, structured and age-worthy at its best. Its name, "the black grape of Avola," ties it to a town on Sicily's sun-baked south-eastern coast.