Caruso & Minini: A Tuff Baglio in Marsala, Matisse on the Label, and Sicily Without the Sunburn

Say "Marsala" to most people and they'll think of a sticky brown thing at the back of a cupboard, bought in 1994 for a recipe and never opened again. Say "Sicilian wine" and, if we're honest, a lot of people still picture something cheap, jammy and slightly too warm.

Both of those reputations are about thirty years out of date, and Caruso & Minini are one of the reasons why.

We've got three of their bottles on the shelf at the moment, which is enough of an excuse to talk about them properly.

Two families, one baglio

The winery is a marriage of two very different halves.

The Caruso side is Sicilian, and they've been growing grapes on the Trapani hills since the middle of the last century. For decades that's all they did: grow the fruit and sell it on, which is what almost everyone in western Sicily did. It was only at the end of the 1990s that the third generation, Stefano, Francesco and Roberto, decided to take the whole thing through to the bottle themselves.

The Minini side comes from Verolanuova, just outside Brescia in northern Italy, where Mario and Francesco Minini's family have run a wine trading business since just after the First World War. They knew markets. They also, by their own account, fell fairly hard for Sicily.

The two families joined forces in the early 2000s and set up shop in an old baglio on Corso Piersanti Mattarella in Marsala: a fortified courtyard farmhouse built of yellow tuff in 1904, right in the middle of the city's historic wine district. It's since been restored into a working winery with a barrel cellar, tasting rooms, a wine bar and a shop. The wines now go to around forty countries.

The fourth generation is already in: Rosanna Caruso runs production planning and purchasing, Giovanna Caruso came back from a law degree to make wine instead (she's a member of Le Donne del Vino and a former Assovini Sicilia board director), and Giovanna's husband Andrea Artusio, a Piedmontese sommelier, handles the export side.

"Beautiful, but windy"

Cicero described Roman Lilybaeum, which is modern Marsala, as pulcherrima sed ventosa: most beautiful, but windy. Two thousand years on, that's still the single most useful thing anyone has said about the place. Local tradition has him founding a school of rhetoric on Schola, one of the little islands in the lagoon just up the coast, which is presumably how he came to have an opinion about the weather.

The wind is the point. The western tip of Sicily catches the maestrale from the north-west and the scirocco up from Africa, and it barely stops. It dries the vines, keeps disease pressure low, and carries a faint salinity inland. The sun does the rest: something like 300 days of it a year.

You've almost certainly seen the coastline even if you've never been. The Stagnone lagoon just north of the city, with its salt pans and squat windmills and blinding white salt piles, is one of the most photographed bits of Sicily there is.

But the vineyards aren't in Marsala

This is the bit that surprises people. The cellar is on the coast; the vines are not.

Caruso & Minini farm 120 hectares up in the hills around Salemi, inland in the Valle del Belice, between 200 and 450 metres above sea level. Most of the rows face north and north-west, which in Sicily is a deliberate act of self-restraint: you're turning your back on the hottest sun to keep acidity in the grapes. The soil is clay, silica and limestone, full of small stones that shade the roots and keep the ground cool.

The whole thing is farmed organically. They cap yields at 80 quintals per hectare, which is modest, plant flowers between the rows to pull in pollinators, use green manure to keep the soil breathing, and fertilise organically. They're certified sustainable under Equalitas, and they've cut a fair chunk of the winery's carbon by relamping and putting in solar. There are 18 hectares of olives too, over in the Val di Mazara.

The vineyards are worked by agronomist Fernando Paternò and the wines made by oenologist Giuseppe Ferranti, and between the two of them the house style is remarkably consistent: fresh, savoury, unshowy, and a good degree or so lighter in alcohol than you'd brace yourself for from Sicily.

Salemi itself is worth a detour if you're ever nearby. Medieval on the surface, Arab underneath (it was Alicia under the Emirate), with a Norman castle built on a Greco-Roman fort and a view over the whole valley.

Now look at the labels

This is our favourite thing about them.

Those bright, cut-paper illustrations on the Caruso & Minini bottles were drawn by the Laboratorio Zanzara in Turin, a non-profit studio, curated by Gianluca Cannizzo, that works with artists with intellectual and behavioural disabilities. The designs take their cue from Matisse's cut-outs, and they were made from photographs and bits and pieces gathered on site in Marsala: the local flora and fauna, worked back into shapes.

So the white star on the Frappello and the blue triangles on the Bibbo aren't a branding agency's idea of Mediterranean. They're somebody's drawing of what's actually growing outside the cellar door. Those labels are now in about forty countries.

We'd stock the wines anyway. But it's a lovely thing to be able to tell someone across the counter.

The three we've got in

Bibbo Zibibbo, £17

Zibibbo is Muscat of Alexandria, and its name comes from the Arabic zabīb, meaning dried grape. Which tells you everything about why people expect it to be sweet, and nothing about what's in this bottle.

Bibbo is bone dry. The grapes are destemmed and given a cryomaceration, a cold soak at 4°C for twelve to twenty-four hours, to pull the aromatics out of the skins before it's gently pressed off them. Three months in steel, two more in bottle. What comes out is pale straw, with ripe apricot, almond and orange blossom on the nose, a soft, generous middle, and a long finish. 12.5%.

If you've only ever met Zibibbo as a dessert wine from Pantelleria, this is a proper surprise. Aperitif, anything from the sea, anything with grilled vegetables in it.

Frappello, £18

The name is a portmanteau: Frappato plus Nerello Mascalese, roughly half and half, off the Salemi hills at around 350 metres.

Between them those two grapes make the case for Sicily better than almost anything else on the island. Frappato brings the perfume and the crunch; Nerello Mascalese, the Etna grape, brings the savoury, faintly smoky bit and the structure. Hand-harvested, fifteen to twenty days on skins at 25°C in steel, malolactic in steel, then 30% goes into 225-litre barriques for four months while the rest sits in tank for eight. Just enough oak to round it off.

Ruby with a purple rim, wild berries and gentle spice, soft and well-integrated tannin, and a long savoury finish. 13.5%, and they make around 50,000 bottles. Serve it at 14 to 16°C, which in practice means twenty minutes in the fridge on a warm day. It'll handle roast meat, it'll handle a tuna steak, and it's very good with a hard cheese.

Tasari Nero d'Avola 2023, £13

Tasari is the everyday range, and this is the everyday red: 100% Nero d'Avola, the island's flagship grape, not asked to be anything more complicated than delicious. It's the only one of the three bottled as Sicilia DOC rather than under the broader Terre Siciliane umbrella.

Ripe cherry and plum, a rustle of spice and black pepper, then warm, soft and surprisingly well built underneath, with velvety tannins and a long finish. Caruso & Minini's own back label says it wraps the palate "like a caress", which is a very Sicilian thing to print on a £13 bottle and, annoyingly, not far off. 13%.

This is the Tuesday bottle. Pizza, pasta, a plate of salami, a bowl of something with aubergine in it.

Why we stock them

Because they're doing the unglamorous version of the right thing. Two families, one on the land and one in the market, farming 120 hectares organically on hillsides they've deliberately planted away from the sun, capping their yields, and putting the money into the vineyard rather than the marketing. And then handing the labels to a Turin art studio instead of a branding agency.

The result is Sicilian wine that tastes of a windy limestone hillside rather than a heatwave. At £13 to £18, that's a very easy sell.

All three are on the shelf at the stall in Stockport Indoor Market. Come and have a look.

And if you'd rather it came to you

If the sound of bottles like this turning up at your door appeals, that's exactly what the Wine Boy Club is for: a box of hand-picked wines delivered across Stockport and South Manchester, as often (or not) as you like. No algorithms, no bulk buying, just Mark picking bottles he's excited about. The Frappello in particular is exactly the sort of thing that ends up in there.