Sardinian and Sicilian

If you like visiting Sardinia, you will know about  Vermentino. This, they say, is the wine to drink there. It is a bright and peachy white and in the south of France they also drink a popular version of it under the same name.

Yes, but from either source  is it a wine that travels well? Successfully enough, I would say, so long as you do hope too highly of it.   The great wine authority Hugh Johnson mentions neither sort - nor, for that matter, Sardinia - in his enjoyably substantial book, Wine: A Life Uncorked, so you have been warned.

In fact, it is a thoroughly quaffable wine, though perhaps it is now getting a bit late in the year to be quaffing it. Nevertheless Waitrose’s Italian version “Le Stelle” at £8.99 is invitingly described as deliciously zippy. It may conceivably be slightly superior to its French version  from the Languedoc, romantically described as “nighttime harvested.”

Both go with seafood and pasta, and are a match for the usual sauces,  though I suspect I would get tired of these wines  rather quickly. Both strike me as somewhat overpriced for what they are, and the white Sicilian Insolia I drank today in one of Edinburgh’s best and newest Italian restaurants, the Osteria del Tempo Perso in Bruntsfield, seemed to me in every way more interesting.

I’ll be writing soon about this admirable osteria. The crispness of its Insolia, served by the glass for just under £6, is more to my taste than the sunniness of Vermentino, and it is good news that M&S have announced it as something innovatory on their wine  list.

2 October 2014