In an effort to immerse ourselves in Etna reds, the wine panel recently tasted 20 bottles from recently issued vintages. For the tasting, Florence Fabricant and I were joined by Liz Nicholson, the wine director at Maialino near Gramercy Park, and Shin Tseng, the wine director at Lupa in Greenwich Village.

If you haven’t already guessed, I love these wines. I love the lightness of their textures, the purity of the red fruit and mineral flavors, their refreshing nature, their elegance and their subtlety. They have the weightlessness of good Burgundy, though not the complexity and the tradition (at least, not yet).

Despite the fact that Etna is an ancient source of wine, many of the leading producers today are newcomers, drawn there by the conviction that wines from Etna will be like no others. Marco de Grazia, an American importer of wines from Piedmont and Tuscany, decided Etna was where he wanted to settle down and make his own wine. He founded Tenuta delle Terre Nere, and since 2002 has been issuing multiple cuvées.

Andrea Franchetti of Passopisciaro made wine in Tuscany before adding vineyards on Etna to his holdings. Alberto Graci abandoned his career as a banker to make wine on Etna. And Frank Cornelissen came from Belgium to Etna, where he makes extreme wines unlike almost any others on earth, which people tend to love or hate.

Not everybody is a newcomer, however. Ciro Biondi’s family has made wine on Etna for generations, as have the Calabrettas. Others like Murgo and Fattorie Romeo del Castello measure their time on Etna in decades.

With so many backgrounds, the wines came in an assortment of styles, from determinedly old school to frankly modern to quirky and idiosyncratic. Yet the wines were also bound together by their common features, the taut, graceful texture that speaks of the combination of Etna and the nerello grapes.

While many of these wines can be enjoyed young, our No. 1 wine, the 2002 from Calabretta, demonstrated how well they can age, and how time in the bottle can soften tannins and mellow the sometimes aggressive acidity. The lively, pure 2002, an old-fashioned wine with no evidence of new oak, is Calabretta’s most recent release, making it one of very few producers of still wines in the world that offers the costly service of aging wines for years before releasing them.