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5218 Lawton Avenue
Oakland, CA 94114

510-654-9159

Oliver McCrum Wines has been importing small production Italian wine and distributing to fine retail and restaurant establishes throughout California since 1994. Over time, our portfolio of producers has steadily grown to over 45 producers from 15 different regions of Italy. We look for typical Italian wines with clarity and freshness, usually made from indigenous Italian grape varieties using clean, transparent winemaking techniques and no obvious use of oak. 

Oliver's Mt Etna Notes

Mt Etna

Mount Etna is a huge, very active volcano on the island of Sicily. It stands more than 11,000 feet high, high enough for there to be skiing on the mountain in the winter; it dominates the city of Catania and can be seen from the whole north-east of the island.  Wine is said to have been produced here since Greek times, and there were as many as 50,000 hectares of vineyards here in the 1800s. (Now there are a little more than 1,000 hectares in production, some of them from before the plague of Phylloxera.) The countryside is still dotted with stone palmentos, the buildings that were used to crush grapes and make wine.

Although there were still many vineyards on Etna during the 20th century, the sale of bottled wine was limited. Most of the wine produced there was shipped in bulk from the port of Riposto to the south of France, and to Italian ports such as Genoa; these high-quality bulk wines must have been very useful to producers in other regions. (In the early 1900s European viticulture was still recovering from the effects of Phylloxera, which had destroyed most of the European vineyards at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, but many of the volcanic soils found on Etna were not affected.)

At the end of the 20th century rumors of extraordinary Etna wines began to spread. In around 2000 Marc de Grazia, the entrepreneur who had done a great deal to make Barolo and Barbaresco famous, decided to start making wine on Etna, in the same period also Andrea Franchetti from Passopisciaro and the Belgian importer Frank Cornelissen decided to start his production in Etna, it was a vote of confidence in the region. The red wines were the first to be acknowledged, but in my opinion the whites (and now the rosés) are just as good; fine Etna Bianco is one of Italy’s best, and most age-worthy, whites.

The uniqueness of Etna is due to many factors: the volcanic soil, the altitude of the vineyards, the valuable native varieties, the age of the old vineyards, all these factors contribute to the charm of this extraordinary and unique territory of Italian wine.