Wine of the Week: Epicuro Nero D’Avola

Wine: Epicuro Nero D’Avola

Grape: Nero D’Avola

Region: Sicily, Southern Italy

Vintage: 2013

Price: $5.99

Availability: Trader Joe’s

In the glass: Epicuro Nero D’Avola is a deep blackish-crimson red color with an opaque core going out into a fine slightly violet to ruby-red rim definition with medium-high viscosity.

On the nose: The wine brims with jammy crushed red and black berry character and fruit soup. It has some rich fruity phenolics and underlying licorice-herbal character, but it’s playing second fiddle to all that delicious and fragrant juicy fruit. It smells delicious and is utterly drinkable in the glass.

On the palate: It is a nice mouthful of a wine with juicy black spicy fruit, peppercorns, tobacco, cherry juice, huckleberry sauce, ripe black plums, toast points and loads of chewy minerals. Although the tannins seem very forward through the midpalate, the wine appears measured and balanced. The finish is excellent with more black pepper, crushed ripe brambleberries, and good structure and backbone. For a wine at less than $6 this has staggering fruit.

Odds and ends: I was talking about the wines of Sicily with an old friend who used to work for Wine Spectator in New York but now lives in San Francisco, and it reminded me of how delicious these sturdy full-bodied wines can be. Sicily has been producing wine for thousands of years and some of the oldest native grape varieties are found here. Varieties such as aglianico, primitivo, Salice Salentino and the juicy nero d’Avola. The name simply means the black grape of Avola, which is in the very south of the island of Sicily, not far from where American troops landed in 1943 when they began driving out the Germans and the fascists.

The troops fell in love with these wines and brought them back to the United States after the war, starting a great influx of Sicilian wines into American retail stores. Sicilian wines have another benefit if you’re a thirsty consumer: They’re always easy on the wallet, almost no matter what they are.

My favorite top-end producers in Sicily include the Cusumano family and the Planeta family, but this wonderful drinking wine from Epicuro is no slouch either. Try it with a juicy grilled bison burger like I did and it is a match made in heaven. Drink it now through 2018.

Gil Lempert-Schwarz’s wine column appears on Wednesdays. Write him at P.O. Box 50749, Henderson, NV 89106-0749, or email him at gil@winevegas.com