A Simple Pleasure From Sicily

The red-wine darling of the moment is malbec from Argentina, but there are pretenders to the throne, including one you might not have heard of: Nero d'Avola. Native to southern Italy and now grown almost exclusively in Sicily, Nero d'Avola is an excellent partner for casual fare such as burgers or pizza. As its pedigree suggests, it is also ideal for Mediterranean-style foods, including grilled chicken and fish.

Like malbec, Nero d'Avola has the charm of being cheap. It ranges from about $9 a bottle for a simple quaffer to about $40 for more ambitious bottlings. (Malbec, of course, can soar into the triple digits.) Nero is more earthy and less fruity than most malbecs; in fact, it falls somewhere between grenache and syrah on the flavor spectrum, so fans of Cotes du Rhone should be happy making a detour to Sicily.

Avola, the town for which the grape apparently is named, lies on the southeast coast of Sicily. But it is in the mountainous western tip of Sicily's triangle that Nero d'Avola excels. Here there are high-altitude plantings offering favorable exposure to the sun and sea breezes, plus warm days and cool nights, an essential combination to ensure ripeness and acidity in the wine. In these favorable conditions, Nero d'Avola achieves deep color and strong, though not overpowering, tannins, with flavors of plums, cherries and cocoa. The more expensive examples feature complexity from oak aging, primarily, picking up appealing notes of smoke or old leather.

Though in recent years Nero d'Avola has begun to shine on its own, its color and tannins traditionally made it a favorite blending grape for winemakers up and down the boot. Indeed, it can benefit from a judicious dollop of other wines in the blend. The Tenuta Rapitala winery, in the hills southwest of Palermo, blends 30 percent pinot nero (the Italian name for pinot noir) into a wine it calls Nuar, the Arabic word for flower. The result is a bright, deliciously aromatic red with a brambly mix of raspberry, cherry, green olive and tea. The pinot nero contributes bright color and enticing aromas and lightens the overall blend.

One of the leading wineries of Sicily is Planeta, which produces a range of wines based on Nero d'Avola. These include the Santa Cecilia 2005, which retails for $40 and offers rich, complex flavors of cherries and sage, with an appealing saline character that conjures a sea breeze. But the star of Planeta's line is La Segreta, a $15 gem that blends 50 percent Nero d'Avola with 25 percent merlot, 20 percent syrah and 5 percent cabernet franc. Again a sea breeze comes to mind, this time carrying perhaps the smoke from a bonfire on the beach: a jumble of wood flavors tossed on the flames, plus plums and cherries, and did I mention the smoke? It's a slurry of aromas and flavors that would make no sense as a recipe ingredient list, but they come to mind in a rush as I explore this wine in the glass.

Even so, these are not wines to contemplate during an evening's discourse. They reveal themselves easily and quickly, and they are all about pleasure, not intellect. To appreciate Nero d'Avola you do not need a PhD in wine, just the willingness to enjoy a casual dinner with friends and family.

Dave McIntyre can be reached through his Web site, http://www.dmwineline.com, or at food@washpost.com.