Vermentino di Sardegna is a wine DOC used on the Italian island of Sardinia. Its introduction in February 1988 (a full 15 years after most of its counterparts around the island) followed a period of consistent quality improvements in Sardinian Vermentino wines. One can only assume that these improvements continued, as, in 1996, the Italian wine authorities created the very first Vermentino-based DOCG, Vermentino di Gallura.
As a regional DOC, the Vermentino di Sardegna title covers Sardinia in its entirety, spanning the whole island from Sulcis and Cagliari in the south to Gallura in the north. It shares this broad catchment area with several other DOCs, most notably Cannonau di Sardegna, Moscato di Sardegna and the Sardinian curiosities Monica di Sardegna and Sardegna Semidano.
As is clear from its title, Vermentino di Sardegna is made from the Vermentino grape variety, which is increasingly significant in Sardinian wine.
Quite how Vermentino arrived in Sardinia is not entirely clear. The variety has clear connections with north-western Italy (specifically Liguria), but further inspection reveals that it is also widely represented in south-eastern France (in Provence and the Languedoc) where it has been known as Rolle for many centuries. It is also a key variety on the French island of Corsica, immediately north of Sardinia. The arrival of Vermentino in Sardinia, then, could be traced just as easily to southern France as northern Italy. It has also been suggested that Vermentino may be of Spanish origin, even though the variety is barely known in Spain today. If this theory is accurate, then the variety would most likely have arrived via Alghero, which has had a succession of rulers of Spanish origins over the centuries.
Whatever Vermentino's origins, and however it arrived in Sardinia, today it is one of the island's most successful grape varieties.
