Cannonau is Sardinia's Grenache — and Sardinia disputes the direction of travel. The standard account has the grape arriving with the Aragonese from Spain; the island answers with wine residues from nuragic-era sites that support a very old native viticulture, and some scholars now argue Sardinia may be Grenache's point of origin rather than one of its colonies.
Whatever its passport, the grape is at home: sun-dried herbs, red fruit and gentle tannin from vineyards that climb from the coast into the granite hills of the interior. Those hills hold the island's famous "blue zone" villages, where Cannonau is the daily wine of some of the longest-lived communities in the world — an advertisement no marketer could have written.