Grape Groups and Families - Native Wine Grapes of Italy - page 75

thick skins. There is only one offi cial clone of
Malvasia di Lipari available, the VM-4.
Crespan, Cabello, Giannetto, Ibanez, Karo-
glan Kontic, Maletic, Pejic, Rodriguez, and
Antonacci (2006) published a landmark Mal-
vasia study indicating that Malvasia di Lipari is
identical to Sardinia's Malvasia di Sardegna,
Calabria's Greco Bianco (which they called
Greco Bianco di Gerace in their study), Croatia's
Malvasia Dubrovaˇka, Madeira's Malvasia Cân-
dida, and Spain's Malvasía de Sitges (Malvasía
Rosada of the Canary Islands and Madeira's
Malvasia Cândida Roxa are two red-berried
mutations of this latter variety.) The research-
ers also showed this Malvasia to be different
from Malvasia Istriana and Malvasia del Lazio,
as the percentage of common alleles is low (33.3
percent and 27.6 percent, respectively).
Malvasia di Lipari looks and behaves very
differently from most other Malvasia s. Early
budding, it's susceptible to spring frosts and is
oidium sensitive. It's a very irregular producer
and worse, low-yielding; it thrives on volcanic
soils, but is not very vigorous. The wine is also
completely different than that made, for exam-
ple, on Sardinia. I admit to being surprised by
Crespan et al.'s conclusions, as I fail to see any
resemblance between the Sardinian and the
Eolian Malvasia cultivars, either as grapes or as
wine, and the same applies to the Greco Bianco
variety. Perhaps it is a matter of biotypes that
have evolved over the centuries, changing their
phenotypic aspect in response to different
microclimates and soils: so-called ecotypes or
site-specifi c biotypes. In this light, a study by
Barba, Di Lernia, Chiota, Carimi, Carra, and
Abbate (2008) is especially noteworthy, since it
determined that all the accessions of Malvasia
di Lipari from the islands they analyzed were
affected either by leaf roll virus or fanleaf virus,
diseases that can explain the great difference in
morphologic appearance between the varieties.
Furthermore, as Malvasia di Lipari is undoubt-
edly a very old cultivar, it seems reasonable to
assume that it built up numerous mutations
throughout the centuries leading to different
phenotypes. Not surprisingly, Calabrian pro-

ducers like Ceratti do not believe their Greco
Bianco is identical to Malvasia di Lipari.
The study by Crespan's group (2006a) also
showed that Malvasia di Lipari is identical to
Malvasia di Sardegna. Given that the wines
made from these two varieties smell and taste
completely different, the proposed identity is
surprising. In fairness, the grapes do look alike,
and differences in the wines may just be the
result of very diverse habitats and winemaking
skills and methods. Somewhat disappointingly,
in an extremely interesting study on Sardinian
biodiversity and local grapevines (De Mattia,
Imazio, Grassi, Lovicu, Tardaguila, Failla, et al.
2007), in which grapevine accessions were
genotyped at thirteen microsatellite loci, Malva-
sia di Sardegna was, inexplicably, not among
the Sardinian cultivars analyzed. A shame, as
perhaps a little more light could have been shed
on this variety and its relationships to other
Malvasia s.
Locals in Sardinia have grown what they
believed to be a specifi c Malvasia di Sardegna,
also long known as Manusia and Marmaxia, at
least since the sixteenth century, though
according to Nieddu, two biotypes were
described as early as 1877. Interestingly, the
Malvasia s from Bosa and Cagliari were already
renowned for their quality in 1933. Microsatel-
lite testing at twelve SSR loci has confi rmed the
identity between the Malvasia vines grown
around Bosa and Cagliari, so wines called Mal-
vasia di Bosa and Malvasia di Cagliari are made
with Malvasia di Sardegna, which in turn, is, as
we have been told, Malvasia di Lipari. However,
Malvasia di Sardegna still remains listed sepa-
rately in the National Registry at number 136.
There are as yet no clones available of Malvasia
di Sardegna.
The curious thing is that Malvasia di Sar-
degna is, to the best of my knowledge, a nonaro-
matic or only very slightly aromatic variety,
producing very mineral, powerful wines that
can be either dry or sweet. This clashes a little
with what I know of Malvasia di Lipari, which,
though not the most aromatic of grapes, is
more so than Malvasia di Sardegna, and it