November 16, 2018

Marsala, the historic sweet fortified wine from Sicily, comes in three colors.

Answer: True.

Marsala comes in just three colors—oro ("golden"), ambra ("amber"), and rubino ("ruby"), although rubino is extremely rare. Each type can be made at three levels of sweetness: fairly dry (secco, 4% residual sugar), noticeably sweet (semisecco, 4-10% residual sugar), and very sweet (dolce, over 10% residual sugar). All Marsala is fortified to 17-18% alcohol. Despite numerous cheap supermarket examples, Marsala can be extremely delicious when made by a first-rate producer, like De Bartoli.

Enchanted Forest

As we near the end of 2022, I want to pause and reflect on this excerpt from a sobering piece written by Ted Lemon, owner and winemaker of the California winery Littorai. The article was written more than three years ago. Has much changed?

“Sustainability, by its very name, implies maintaining a system that has become untenable. The argument for sustainability systems remains built on the idea of the magic pot. Sustainability is a tired term from the late 20^th century of which we should be ashamed. Sustain what? The path we are on? If climate change tells us anything, it should certainly put to death the idea that there is a global or local stasis worth sustaining. A newer buzz word is re-generative agriculture. This, too, is an illusion. We have wrought such change on our planet that there is not a person alive, nor will there be for many generations to come, who will witness the ‘regeneration’ of the natural world as it existed a few hundred years ago.”

Ted Lemon, Littorai

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