Thanks to our friends Alan and Limei of Ascent Way Wines in Taipei, for a few days last week we spent time with Antonio Rallo, certainly one of the most influential figures in Italian wine today. Mr Rallo is CEO of Donnafugata wines in Sicily, and as President of Assovini Sicily he represents the entire island in affairs of the wine industry all over the world. However, for sophisticated wine consumers he is certainly best known for his superb sweet wine, Ben Ryé.

Antonio makes this unique sweet wine himself on the tiny island of Pantelerria, a dot on the map in the middle of the Mediterranean sea, south of Marsala, east of Tunis, indeed so close to Tunisia that you can make calls on your Tunisian cellphone without difficulty and on a clear day see the North African coast. Most of the year the island is bone dry and windswept, and though this mid-ocean volcano is just 83 sq kilometers in area, it rises to a height of over 800 meters.

High on the hills of Pantelerria vines suffer in the Mediterranean wind, trained low to the ground, even in depressions scooped from the black volcanic gravel. For thousands of years, since Phoenician times, vineyards have struggled here, often behind walls built around the vines to shelter them from the wind. The vines that produce Ben Ryé average over 100 years of age. For more than a century they have labored on these high slopes where nights are cold, even in summer, and the diurnal range can be as much as 20 degrees celcius, relief that protects the precious acidity of these white-wine grapes growing in Pantelerria’s intense daytime heat. Rains arrive in late autumn all at once, and then leave the island parched again, the vines groping downward through cracks in the volcano to find just enough water to survive. Irrigation is not practiced, and so the vines, named Zibibbo (the Arabic name for Muscat de Alexandria) produce only meager yields of intense grapes, an intensity that vintners concentrate further by Passito – drying the grapes on racks exposed to the sun and the wind. The characteristic orange-blossom of Muscato becomes intense apricot, figs and honey in the best of these wines, and Ben Ryé is the very best.

Antonio retreats to Pantelerria whenever he can to work very hard on his vines in nine different sites, all harvested at different times. Grapes from the early ripening sites go into the Passito process where their sugars and acids are concentrated through drying, but inevitably the acid levels of these grapes are too low to balance adequately their very high sugar content. His target is 200 gm/l, and for so much sugar, only equally intense acidity can deliver the freshness Antonio demands from Ben Ryé. Thus when grapes from the later-ripening sites come in full of fresh acidity, he adds passito grapes to the fresh must, enough to raise the sugar levels to the limit at which his native yeasts can still thrive to produce alcohol, and the fermentation begins. When these hardy yeasts have consumed most of the sugar, dropping the specific gravity of the growing wine, he adds more grapes, usually in four stages over a period of three months. This extraordinarily long fermentation corresponds to the lowering temperatures of winter, and often Antonio has to raise the temperature in his vats just to keep the fermentation active. The result, each year around Christmas-time is a wine of unparalleled balance, length, intensity and complexity.

The figures speak for themselves: Ben Ryé boasts more than 14% alcohol, 200 gm/l of sugar and 7.9 gm/l of acid, and every year Ben Ryé wins accolades. It is regularly listed among the 10 best wines of the world, and though production is tiny, if you can find it, the price is quite reasonable. This wine will certainly evolve with bottle aging. I predict that in the decades to come today’s vintages of Ben Ryé will be prized beyond any other sweet wines, regardless of their origin.

Ben Ryé is a personal project for Antonio Rallo. His object apparently is not to make money, for no one in their right mind would imagine Ben Ryé is a money maker, in any case not directly. But this marvelous wine brings immeasurable prestige to Donnafugata, a winery that rests not on ancient tales of ancient feudal aristocracy, but bursts forth with the pure dedication of ordinary people rediscovering an extraordinary natural heritage. Sicilian winemakers are making their professionalism felt in the wider world of wine, and Donnafugata leads the vanguard.