Zibibbo: The Sun-Baked Muscat That Drinks Drier Than It Smells

Zibibbo is pronounced zee-BEE-boh.

If you love how Moscato smells but not how it drinks, Zibibbo is the grape you have been looking for.

It is the same botanical variety as Muscat of Alexandria, one of the oldest cultivated grapes on earth. On the island of Pantelleria, a black volcanic dot in the Mediterranean closer to Tunisia than to Sicily proper, it takes on a second identity. The Phoenicians almost certainly carried it west, and the island's name for it, Zibibbo, comes from the Arabic zabib, meaning raisin. That single word tells you most of what you need to know about this place and this wine.

What it tastes like

Bury your nose in a glass and you get the full Muscat show: orange blossom, honeysuckle, ripe apricot, a little candied lemon peel. It is one of the few grapes that actually smells the way people imagine wine is supposed to smell.

Then the dry versions do something Moscato rarely does. They finish savory. The relentless sun and sea wind of Pantelleria push the fruit to ripeness, but the volcanic soil and the salt air leave a mineral, almost briny snap on the back end. The result reads sweet on the nose and dry on the tongue, which keeps it interesting from the first sip to the last.

The passito is the other face. Grapes are laid out on mats to dry in the sun until they are half raisin, then pressed. What comes out is amber, thick, and honeyed: dried apricot, fig, orange marmalade, saffron. Sweet, but with enough acid to stay lively rather than syrupy.

An island that grows wine sideways

Pantelleria is not a comfortable place to farm. It is windswept enough that the vines cannot stand up straight, so growers train them low in shallow pits, one bush at a time, in a method called alberello pantesco. UNESCO added the practice to its list of intangible cultural heritage, the only viticulture technique so honored. Each vine is tended by hand because a machine could never reach it.

That difficulty is exactly why Zibibbo stays a footnote. It does not scale. The island is small, the labor is brutal, and the famous wine it produces is a sweet one that most people file under dessert and forget. The dry, aromatic table version, the one that competes directly with everyday Moscato, barely leaves Italy.

Bottles to look for

The name to know is Donnafugata, whose Ben Ryé is the benchmark Passito di Pantelleria and one of Italy's most celebrated sweet wines. If you want to understand what this grape can do at its peak, that is the bottle, and it is widely sold in the US in half-bottles.

For dry Zibibbo, look for wines labeled Zibibbo Secco or dry Pantelleria; producers like Donnafugata (Lighea) and a handful of small island estates make them. Here is the honest part: most US shelves carry only the sweet passito, not the dry table wine, so the aromatic dry white that actually swaps for your Moscato is genuinely hard to find stateside. There is no formal consensus score I can point you to for the dry bottlings — the category is too small. If a shop has one, buy it and judge for yourself. That is half the fun of drinking underdog wine anyway.

Where to buy

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The sweet passito, especially Donnafugata Ben Ryé, is easy to find in US retail. Dry Zibibbo is scarcer, worth asking a serious wine shop to special-order, or checking a Sicilian specialist importer.

browse Zibibbo on Wine.com →

— Chris Berry

If you're switching from a famous grape

If Moscato is your comfort pour and you want to keep the perfume while losing the sugar, dry Zibibbo is the move — same Muscat lineage, half the sweetness, twice the character. It sits in the same aromatic-white family as Gewürztraminer, so if you like wines that announce themselves before you taste them, you are in the right neighborhood. See Wines Like Gewürztraminer and Order This Instead.

Part of Lesser-Known Wines: 17 Obscure Grapes Worth Switching To — the full underdog-swap guide.