Mount Etna, Sicily

Elizabeth Schneider (0:08)

Welcome to Wine for Normal People, the podcast for people who like wine, but not the snobbery that goes with it.

I'm your host, Elizabeth Schneider, author of the Wine for Normal People book and certified wine dork.

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Before I get started, I have to shill come over October, we're in October. I am putting on some fun, free mini classes that are designed to be bursts of information and really a reason for you to invite a friend, a family member, a neighbor over, grab a bottle of wine or a couple bottles of wine and have a fun activity to do together and then hang out afterwards. On my YouTube channel, Wine for Normal People, on YouTube, it's gonna be streaming live. I want you to grab a friend. And on Thursday night at 8 p.m. Eastern, I know that's a little early Pacific time, but hopefully some of you can make it or you can join late. Check it out live. That is for come over October. I am working with the folks from come over October to make this happen. And I'm so excited. And maybe you don't need a reason to get together, but I am giving you one. So I will see you there on Thursday on my YouTube channel. I want to give a special thanks to all of the patrons on Patreon for supporting me about the post that I did. I really appreciate it. I know that I did not have to tell you about details that were on there, but I really just want to say thank you and thank you for your ongoing support. If you want to become a member, patreon.com/wine for Normal People. As this week proved, it's definitely more than just a membership community. It's a group of really amazing people. Thank you everybody for your really kind comments, and for those of you who don't usually comment, who wrote to me, I appreciate it. If you want to become a member of this really amazing community, like I said, so much more than just a bunch of wine people together, patreon.com/wine for Normal People. If you can't get enough of the classes, don't forget winefornormalpeople.com/classes.

Wines of the Loire Valley, I haven't taught that in a really long time, is on Saturday. And also don't forget about the recorded classes. There are seven. I am about to put Riesling around the world up. Also, Seurat around the world will make it up there eventually. Also, if you can't take the live classes, it's a great opportunity to take a class. You can pause and rewind, check it out.

So I want to talk about Mount Etna, a place that I have been several times that is infinitely fascinating to me. And this show is going to be all the things that I love. I mean, obviously, it's Italy, so already check. But it incorporates some very dorky science stuff. It's volcanology, which I think is very cool. Randomly, I happen to record and edit a volcanic wines class that I don't offer very often. So I decided to put it up. And that is one of the recorded classes that you can watch if you want. You can learn all about volcanology in that, because I definitely do a dive on that. But Mount Etna is such an amazing place. And the Etna DOC, so Denominazione di Origine Controllata, is tied to the biggest active volcano in Europe, Mount Etna.

And lest you think it's not active, you can look on the news and it's constantly spewing something. And the times I've been there, she is smoking away from one of the craters or vents.

Etna is on the northeast coast of Sicily. It's north of Catania, which is one of the major cities of Sicily. It's one of the most active volcanoes in the world.

And it has been erupting consistently for at least 500,000 years. And Mount Etna is one of 16 volcanoes in the world that is said to pose a high risk to life and property, according to the UN. Constantly lava flowing, ash, steam, and it's going to change the vineyard sites and the soils. It's not necessarily that there's going to be lava flow paving over the vineyards, although that could happen. It doesn't happen regularly. It's the ash that blows around from the mountain afterwards, after an eruption. It dries and it blows and it can blow all the way down into certainly Catania. The city can be covered in ash from the winds that come down. Actually, the Mistral from France blows all the way towards Etna and there are other local winds and those can spread ash everywhere, but that's going to change the soil type, layers and layers of ash. There's new ash, there's old ash, and then it's all these layered bits. So the soil composition is changing constantly, and if there's enough layers, you may eventually change some of the elevations. So things change quite frequently in the DOC, but the vineyards have managed to survive centuries and millennia of volcanic eruptions. People have abandoned them and then come back.