Tenuta delle Terre Nere

Marco de Grazia established Tenuta delle Terre Nere in 2002 — the same year that Etna began attracting serious international attention — after a career importing Italian wine to the United States convinced him that the mountain's ancient Nerello Mascalese vines were capable of producing something the rest of Italy was not.

The estate's holdings are spread across the northern face of Etna in a patchwork of small parcels, each farmed under Ecocert organic certification, each reflecting a specific altitude, exposure, and soil composition within the mountain's volcanic geology. De Grazia's approach to bottling these parcels separately — predio by predio — was borrowed from Burgundy's single-vineyard logic and applied to a mountain where the variation between plots separated by a few hundred meters of altitude can be as profound as the difference between two villages on the Côte de Nuits.

The wines have drawn 96 points from Wine Advocate across multiple single-vineyard bottlings. The Calderara Sottana and Santo Spirito are the most consistently celebrated, but the estate's entry-level Etna Rosso carries the same farming standard and is among the most persuasive arguments in Italian wine for quality at accessible prices.

Terre Nere is now among the first names any serious Italian wine buyer reaches for when Etna comes up — which, increasingly, it does.