Grillo

A grape with two careers on one island. Grillo was born in nineteenth-century Sicily as a cross of Catarratto and Zibibbo — the Muscat of Alexandria — and spread widely after phylloxera precisely because it suited marsala: sugar-rich, sturdy, the ideal base for the fortified wine that was then Sicily's glory.

When marsala's market declined in the twentieth century, the grape might have gone down with the ship. Instead it reinvented itself as a crisp dry varietal white, and turned out to have been hiding an aromatic personality all along — citrus and jasmine from its Muscat parent, white peach, and a sea-breeze salinity from the west-coast vineyards around Trapani and Marsala where it is still concentrated.