My teenage summers were often spent in a gloomy hilltop villa in Fiesole with my mother's best friend, a woman belonging to a powerful Florentine family with onetime fascist connections. After every meal, the family grandmother — la nonnalina — came out into the garden at dusk with a tray of Vin Santo and toasted in roundabout terms the long-dead Duce and his merry men. Sometimes, as the glasses of this amber Tuscan dessert wine were tipped, this lovely, unassuming woman murmured a little song that went like this: "Siamo i fascisti / Il terrore dei communisti."

I mention this not because it has anything integral to do with Vin Santo but simply to explain why this peculiar wine always strikes a mournful, melancholic chord with me. The dreadful habit of dunking biscotti into Vin Santo had not yet taken hold back then, and the wine served the purpose that so-called dessert wines have always fulfilled around the Mediterranean, namely the contemplation of life's adversities.

I still think of Vin Santo this way — a wine of family, memory, and cozy dusks. It's not an especially popular drink in the United States, partly because Americans, like the British, do not know quite what to do with sweet wines unless they are aristocratic Sauternes. In what spirit does one drink them and why? Out of this incertitude has come a veritable lake of cheaper, toffee-sweet plonk that drowns the finale of almost any Italian meal. One can't deny that this has earned Vin Santo a bad rap.

I remember reading a piece in the British New Statesman a few years ago in which the writer Victoria Moore complained of Vin Santo's "mongrel sherry-fruity" tang. "It's not amber coloured," she went on, "it is rust co-loured, and is usually at its most poisonous when decanted directly from a small wooden barrel…. Perhaps part of the problem is that, traditionally, the wine has been made by any Tuscan peasant with a bit of land and a space under the rafters in which to dry the grapes." This causes "the noble taste of tradition to eclipse that of the alcohol itself." The absurdity of this statement is striking. It is not the peasant Vin Santo that is at fault, however coarse — it's the mass-produced industrial syrup that most mediocre restaurants serve up.

Traditionally, Vin Santo — or "holy wine" — is indeed made by air-drying mostly Trebbiano and Malvasia grapes on straw mats in attics until they are desiccated into raisin form. The drying takes several months; waters in the grape condense into sugars, and the shriveled grapes are pressed any time between November and March. The juice is then put into small 13-gallon barrels called caratelli. A drop of Vin Santo from prior vintages is sometimes added to mix in the proper yeasts. Most Vin Santo is allowed to ferment twice: right at the beginning of the process and then during the long months and years it might lie in oak or chestnut barrels in an open building called a vinsantaia, which exposes the casks to the vicissitudes of the seasons.