» Malvasia bianca
The big family of Malvasia grapes is divided, as we know, into the white ones and those with coloured fruit. This variety too boasts distant, historical origins and once again, as with the Negroamaro and Primitivo varieties, the road leads to Greece, or in this case more precisely to the eastern Mediterranean.
The time is towards the end of the Middle Ages, when Genoan and Venetian ships dominated the seas. The name Malvasia itself apparently derives from the Greek term Monenbasia, which means “port with a single entrance”. And it is the Venetians themselves who are credited with using the term Malvasia to indicate the wines coming from the eastern Mediterranean. It was the time when the ships of the marine republics, along with luxury goods, spices, wools and other merchandise for trading, were also loaded with these sweet wines, headed for the countries of northern Europe: “because the wines of the Mediterranean were sweeter, heavier and more alcoholic, which meant that they travelled better, lasted longer and were therefore more valuable” (Unwin, History of Wine, 1993). And thus they supplanted, in both taste and market value, the dry white wines of northern Europe, Gascony and Germany.
As for our Malvasia Bianca, the biotype has been pinpointed in the area of Fontanebianche near Syracuse. Its leaves are medium-sized, pentagonal, five-lobed, its bunches average in size and density, its grapes average in size and spheroid in shape with a slightly pruinous, yellowish-green skin.
The variety forms part of the composition of the Leverano DOC.
