I enjoy wine enough that friends often hand me the list when we're out together. It's a nice problem to have, but it comes with a follow-up question almost every time: how can I figure out what to order when you're not here?

When the answer needs to work in Italy, I give the same one every time. Order something from Mount Etna.

Etna is the volcano in Sicily, and wine grown on its slopes has become one of the easiest, most reliable things to order off an Italian wine list. White or red, it doesn't much matter. If you want white, ask for Etna Bianco. If you want red, Etna Rosso. It's rarely the only option on a list, but it's almost never absent either, and most lists carry no more than one or two examples, which keeps the decision simple rather than overwhelming.

The reliability isn't an accident. Vines grown in volcanic soil tend to produce wine with a particular freshness and a mineral edge, a kind of brightness that's hard to fake and hard to get wrong. The soil does a lot of the work before the winemaker is even involved. Etna is also still a bit under the radar compared to its more famous Italian cousins, which means the price tends to be friendlier too. Put it together and you get a wine that's affordable, consistent, and simple to spot on a menu, which is exactly what you want when you just need a good answer without overthinking it.

So that's the trick, and if you're traveling in Italy, you can use it almost anywhere. The harder question is what to do with it everywhere else.

I'd love to say there's a version of this in every country, a tidy regional shortcut you can learn once and carry with you forever. But that wouldn't be quite true. Etna works because it checks two boxes at once: it's consistently good, and you don't need any real expertise to find it. Plenty of places have interesting regional wines. Far fewer have one that's both that reliable and that easy to spot without years of paying attention. I only know about this one because I lived in Italy long enough to notice the pattern.

What I'd suggest instead, for anywhere you don't have a shortcut like this handy, is something simpler. Ask whoever is serving you what they'd order themselves off that list, tonight. It's a slightly different question than "what's good," and it tends to get a more honest answer. You can also look for the bottle that appears only once on the list. A list padded with familiar names to fill space looks different from one where somebody added a single unusual bottle on purpose, and that bottle is often the one worth trying.

And if there's a place you travel to often, it's worth doing what happened with Etna and me: paying attention long enough, over time, to find your own version of it. You won't get there in a weekend. But you might end up with your own easy answer for the next time someone hands you the list.

What's your go-to order when you're handed a wine list and put on the spot? I'd love to hear it.