Wine Arcana

Grape

Perricone

Also known as Pignatello, Guarnaccio

Perricone is a dark-skinned Sicilian grape whose present revival is centred on the island's west and centre. Also called Pignatello, it can make substantial, spicy reds, but contemporary producers also use it for rosé. Its interest lies partly in that range: restoring a local variety need not mean reproducing only its old wine styles.

Aerial panorama of vineyard parcels across rolling farmland.
Vineyards around Erice in the Trapani area, part of Perricone’s western Sicilian setting. By KnedWiki, via Wikimedia Commons; CC0 1.0; Resized and recompressed as JPEG.

Decline and recovery

The Sicilian regional wine institute, IRVO, describes Perricone as a major red variety in nineteenth-century Trapani and Palermo, followed by a sharp twentieth-century contraction. Its December 2024 report records a recovery from about 264 hectares in 2012 to 584 hectares in 2021.1. IRVO, Il vitigno Perricone, December 2024, pp. 1–2, using regional vineyard-inventory data through 2021. These are dated vineyard figures, rather than a claim about today's precise area, but they show that the revival includes replanting as well as publicity.

Pignatello is particularly associated with Trapani. Guarnaccio is the name used at Tasca d'Almerita's Regaleali estate, where the producer reports growing Perricone since 1959. Local names therefore connect the variety to different parts of its continuing Sicilian history.

Grapes and wine styles

Mandrarossa describes compact bunches with thick-skinned, dark berries and relatively pale juice. Red colour consequently depends on extracting pigment from the skins during maceration. Its account of the red wine emphasizes body, fruit, and spice; it also explains that small-scale trials led the estate to develop a Perricone rosé. Shorter skin contact offers a different use for the same fruit, rather than requiring a separate pink-grape variety.

Regaleali's Guarnaccio provides a contrasting reference. The estate's 2023 technical information describes fruit from an inland vineyard at about 480 metres, stainless-steel fermentation, completed malolactic fermentation, and about a year in previously used French oak barrels. That sequence separates several influences on the finished wine: ripe fruit supplies the material, malolactic conversion changes the acid balance, and oak maturation develops texture and aroma without making new-wood flavour the sole point of the wine.

Where to place it in Sicily

Perricone's contemporary significance is especially clear in central-western Sicily: inland Regaleali and the Menfi area offer different settings and cellar interpretations. It belongs alongside the island's better-known Nero d'Avola in an account of Sicilian reds, while retaining its own identity. A regional blend and a varietal bottling answer different questions; neither alone defines the grape's full character.

Sources