To understand a place, there is nothing like coming at it through its food and wine, its aromas and its flavours. And to grasp the very soul of the Cinque Terre, I could not recommend anything more warmly than a glass of our famous Sciacchetrà.
It is an amber, sweet wine that, to me, has always meant feast days: the rare, precious moments when my grandparents allowed themselves a small glass of this nectar, the fruit of their own back-breaking work. As a child, I was let dip a bite of bucellato, the sweet cake of my family’s Vernazza, into their cup. A sweet, sweet memory.
What Sciacchetrà is
The name comes from the local dialect for how it is made: sciacca and trá, roughly “crush” and “draw out”.
After the punishing vertical harvest on the steep terraced vineyards of the Cinque Terre, the best grapes are carefully selected and left to dry naturally on cane racks, in the shade, until late November or December. Only once they are fully raisined do the growers press them, concentrating all that sugar and flavour into very little juice.
Then you wait. A bottle needs at least twelve months before you can drink it, and a “Riserva” three years. Those sacrifices, and the sheer labour behind them, led the great Italian wine writer Luigi Veronelli to call the growers here angeli matti, “crazy angels”, whose work keeps this beautiful, fragile landscape alive.
How it tastes, and how to drink it
Bring it to your nose and you find apricot, dried fruit, honey and a note of salt that lingers long after you swallow. Unlike many dessert wines it is not cloying, and the alcohol, though high, stays gentle.
We usually drink it on its own, or with dry biscuits and pastries, but I love it with strong cheese, especially blue cheese on toasted bread. The Riserva is a wonderful meditation wine, to sip slowly.
To buy a real bottle, go straight to the local growers and taste it on the spot; the wineries you can visit are the best place to understand it. The official specification requires it to be made mainly from Bosco (at least 40%), with Albarola and/or Vermentino (up to 40%) and a small share of other local varieties, at a minimum of 17% alcohol. It also carries a Slow Food Presidio, part of the project to protect Italy’s food and wine heritage and the people who keep it.
The Sciacchetrail
Every year, between late March and early April, the Cinque Terre host an extraordinary race that fuses two of our great passions, this sweet wine and trail running: the Sciacchetrail.
It is a demanding ring of around 47 kilometres and 2,600 metres of ascent, joining the five villages, their shrines and the vertiginous vineyards, with exhibitions, music, tastings and, of course, a great deal of sport around it. It is one of the loveliest ways I know to see, on foot and out of breath, exactly what the “crazy angels” have built here.
Frequently asked questions
Sciacchetrà is the rare, sweet passito wine of the Cinque Terre in Liguria, made from grapes (chiefly Bosco, with Albarola and Vermentino) grown on steep coastal terraces, then dried on racks until raisined before pressing. Amber and honeyed but not cloying, it is aged at least a year (three for the Riserva) and is one of Italy’s most labour-intensive and prized dessert wines.
Sciacchetrà is served in small glasses as a dessert or meditation wine, either on its own, with dry biscuits and pastries, or, deliciously, with strong or blue cheese. The Riserva especially rewards slow sipping. It is best enjoyed at a local Cinque Terre winery, where you can taste it at the source.
Because it is extraordinarily labour-intensive. The grapes are hand-harvested on near-vertical terraces held up by dry-stone walls, then hand-selected and dried for weeks before pressing, which yields only a little concentrated juice, and the wine is then aged for at least a year. A single bottle represents an enormous amount of work on a fragile, hand-built landscape.
The best way is to visit a local winery, such as CheO above Vernazza or Cà du Ferrà, where you can taste it at the source and buy directly from the growers. Because production is tiny, authentic Sciacchetrà is hard to find far from the Cinque Terre, so buying on the spot is both the safest and the most rewarding option.
Further reading
- The wineries you can visit: CheO above Vernazza and Cà du Ferrà
- The labour behind it: Cinque Terre winemaking and the dry-stone terraces
- My home region, coast to coast: the Cinque Terre and Liguria
