I first tasted Passito di Pantelleria some years back and ever since I’ve been hooked on it. Last November Pantelleria celebrated the fact that the island’s practice of cultivating vite ad alberello, ie head-trained bush vines like those shown here, had been added to UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding, alongside, for example, St-Émilion, Barolo and Georgian qvevri, the first time an agricultural practice has been selected. Since Pantelleria was one of the few Italian islands I had not yet had the good fortune to visit, I decided to rectify this in...