Sicily

Greek colonists brought vines to Sicily in the eighth century BC, and for a thousand years the island was one of the Mediterranean's great wine exporters — the temples at Agrigento and Segesta were built on that trade. Rome, the Arabs, the Normans and the Spanish each took a turn; each left something in the vineyard and the kitchen. Wine has been made continuously here for roughly three thousand years.

The island's most famous wine was, oddly, an English invention. In the 1770s an English merchant sheltering from a storm in a western Sicilian port tasted the local fortified wine, recognised something that could rival Port and sherry in the British market, and began shipping it. Within decades it was a global commodity; the British fleet in the Mediterranean was supplied with it. The great warehouse cellars built for that trade still line the west coast — and the wine itself, tasted where it was made, bears little resemblance to the cooking ingredient it later became.

The Etna story is the newest and the most exciting. Vineyards climb the flanks of Europe's most active volcano to a thousand metres, on black soils divided into parcels called contrade — a system so precise that comparisons with Burgundy's climats are now routine. Old ungrafted vines survive here in a way they do not elsewhere, some of them well over a century old, planted on lava flows that can be dated to the year. Serious international attention arrived only in the last twenty-five years, which is precisely why the wines still represent value.