IN MY WINE rovings of late, I have been coming across a lot of south Italian bottlings: nero d'avola (in two versions) from Sicily, grillo (a white grape often used for marsala) also from Sicily, primitivo from Puglia, a frascati from Lazio (the province around Rome). Restaurant lists, too, seem to be emphasizing the reds from Sicily, Puglia, and Campania these days, along with vermentino, the fresh, granitic white from Sardinia's northeastern coast.

Is this the Warholian 15 minutes for these wines, or is something more serious going on? The south of Italy has long been known as the "wine lake," a region that produces undistinguished wines in great abundance. Frascati, for example, doesn't seem to be taken seriously by anyone, though I find it delightfully summery, young and fresh, like pinot grigio. It is a wine to be drunk with dinner al fresco at some unassuming Roman trattoria, perhaps in the government quarter or near the Colosseum – or, if one happens not to be in Rome at all, with dinner in the garden on one of our own warm spring evenings, which we hope we will sooner or later have at least a few of.

The reds tend to be full of cherries, berries, and pepperiness in a combination I find irresistible. No ponderous oakings for these wines; despite their deep, rich color, they are full of the Mediterranean sun. The Mediterranean sun is of course quite like the California sun: seldom obstructed, tending to be hot. Those long-ago vintners who brought primitivo to this state (under the name zinfandel) surely recognized the similar temper of sky and land. Maybe some of today's vintners will make the same connection with respect to nero d'avola or some of the other little-known red grapes of the Mezzogiorno. But at the moment our Italian-minded winemakers seem to have fixed their interest on pinot grigio – a likable (and I suppose marketable) grape that does well in our kindly climes.

I wonder about white grapes and a kindly setting, I must say. Red grapes seem to concentrate heat and sun (and become thin and querulous without them, as chilly-climate pinot noirs so often show); white grapes, on the other hand, tend to produce wines that are flowery and slightly overgrown, like an untended garden, a chaos of blossoms and tendrils, in the same circumstances. Whites do better in more-daunting settings – in flinty, rocky soils, in cloudiness and chill, in arid places; they succeed more as extractors than concentrators. These are merely my impressions, of course, and not at all a matter of black (or red) and white. No doubt someone will soon be writing with the suggestion that I go jump in the lake.