The intense flavour of these wines makes them worth the wait. Here are some to try …

“I call them ‘human wines’, not ‘natural wines’,” says renowned winemaker Salvo Foti as we stand in the remote Vigna Bosco, a half-hectare vineyard that, at 1,200m, is the highest on Mount Etna in Sicily. “They link us directly to the landscape and the people here, in the future as well as way back in the past.”

Foti, of the I Vigneri winery, stumbled across this ancient vineyard when he was out stalking wild pigs. The vines are about 150 years old, their trunks as thick and gnarled as the arms of the countless generations who tended and cultivated them, built the dry-stone walls of its terraces and made wine using techniques unchanged for centuries. But, as young people turn their back on this heritage and head to the cities, those ancient skills, as well as the vines themselves, are under threat. In Sicily, as in so many wine-producing regions, rural depopulation and the rise of bulk wine production has led to the decline of small, hard-to-farm vineyards, some of them centuries old; many, like Vigna Bosco, have been abandoned altogether.