A Grilling of Grillo -- A Flavorless White From Sicily

There are grapes that are awesome alone and then there are grapes that are better when combined with some friends.

Good candidates for solo players: grapes that have a ton of flavor, color, aroma, and are generally delicious and don't need much help. Good candidates for blenders: grapes that have one great attribute but other not so great ones. It's like hard alcohol -- some things make terrific blending components but on their own they suck ass (olive juice, tonic, bitters, for me -- although I'm sure you have others).

It's possible that Grillo, native to Sicily and used mainly as a blending grape in Marsala, the fortified wine (kind of like Sherry) that's rarely made by quality producers and is mostly relegated to cooking wine these days, has redeeming qualities, but to me, it's the olive juice of the wine world.

And that's disappointing because it's not as if Sicilians are new to wine. They should be rocking it out. Apparently Dionysis, the god of wine himself, spent some time in Sicily. If you don't believe that, believe that we do have viticulture records in the area from around 1500 BC and the Greeks came in around the 8th century BC to solidify the wine culture there. Things clicked along for a few thousand years until the 1770s when Marsala was introduced by an Englishman, who was familiar with the process of making Sherry and introduced a similar version in Sicily. Grillo was a main grape in quality Marsala and it was grown in spades.

It's easy to see why. Good in heat and arid areas, Grillo grows well in the baking desert that is the island of Sicily. It can be a high alcohol grape, important for the Marsala blend but not of any consequence for a wine made by the variety alone. And like many blenders with limited flexibility, the grape almost went the way of the wooly mammoth (Carmenere is another great example of this). Marsala producers replaced this hard to grow grape with an easy grower, Catarratto (allegedly a parent of Grillo). In the 1990s Grillo was nearly extinct, but then a push for wines made only from the grape brought it back...although, I gotta say, from the example I had, I can't tell you why.

I've heard that Grillo can make decent wines, similar to full-flavored tropical Chardonnay but I can only judge based on the one I tried. It was outstanding in one way -- it was maybe the lamest, most boring wine I've had in months. And in my odyssey of exploring more Italian wines, this is a profound fail. Blech.

Here' s the deal:

2010 Feudo Arancio Stemmari Grillo

The Grape: 100% Grillo

Alcohol: 13%

Price: $12

Where it's from: Sicily, Italy

Color: What I'd call a Kermit wine, this was super green. Just picking it from the shelf you can see that it's pale with really strong green tones. Green sometimes indicates that the wine is young (the vintage is recent) and sometimes that it will be high in acid, but you never know -- color is our least reliable sense in wine sipping.

Smell: Wish I had something to say about this. There was a little waterfall smell, but not much was doing here. The alleged tropical fruit and jasmine flower smell proported by the producer must have been from another wine the marketer was writing about, since this dog didn't hunt.

Taste: WOW this wine was super hot from too much alcohol. There was an acid bite too but barely any flavor. The wine just ended on the swallow (except for the alcohol burn). It was a little bitter, but apart from that, nothing. Totally not worth the calories.

Drink or sink?: Sink. I'll have to try other Grillos to see if they are similar but this wine is exactly what I think is wrong with Italian whites -- it's like alcoholic lemon water with a slight bitterness. For the calories, I'd rather have club soda with lemon and bitters. This wine was SO not worth it.

If you've had a Grillo and it was good, please drop a note below so I can try to snag it!