Vino di Contrada SM - 2020
Arianna Occhipinti
- Region
- Italy 禄 Sicilia 禄 Sicilia DOC
- Type
- white still, dry
- Producer
- Arianna Occhipinti
- Vintage
- 2020
- Grapes
- Grillo
- Alcohol
- 12.5
- Sugar
- 0.3
- Volume
- 750 mL
- Cellar
- not available
One of the newest additions to Arianna's portfolio. A 100% Grillo from a 2 ha plot in Santa Margherita contrada (district). The vines are young (around 5 years old) and grow on whitish calcareous-sandy marl alternating with yellowish-white sands and calcarenites. Destemming, maceration on the skins for 48 hours and spontaneous fermentation in concrete vats and Austrian oak barrels. Racking, end of fermentation and ageing in the same containers for 12 months.
It is not permitted to place contrada (district) names on Sicilian wine labels, so Arianna figured a clever way around the rules. Each contrada is represented by a two-letter abbreviation cheekily struck through with a line to emphasize their illicitness. SM stands for Santa Margherita, BB - for Bomboliere, PT - for Pettineo and FL - for Fossa di Lupo.
Ratings
This wine definitely needed some time to develop. If my information is correct, it's a gorgeous result considering the vines are so young. Bruised apples, spices, bakery, white flowers, apricots, gouache and kerosine lamp. The tannin is quite powerful, yet the wine is balanced and delicious. I would still hide this bottle for one or two years more.
First vintage of new white by A. Occhipinti. More delicate than SP68 Bianco, clean with beautiful mineral bouquet. Salt, vanilla, ginger, cr猫me br没l茅e. Hot and straightforward palate with flavours of ginger and apple. Long nutty aftertaste. Has energy, needs to be retasted in the future.
Arianna Occhipinti
Arianna Occhipinti is a winemaker from Vittoria who founded her own winery in 2004, bottled her first commercial vintage in 2006 and today works exclusively with estate fruit. She embraced winemaking thanks to her uncle, Guisto Occhipinti, proprietor of Vittoria's most famous winery, COS. At the age of 16 years, Arianna started to help him in the cellars. She loved this experience so much that her future connected to wine tightly.
After graduating from oenology school, Arianna started with only 1 hectare of abandoned vines attached to a family vacation house. Over the years, she acquired 25 hectares featuring only autochthonous varieties - 50% Frappato, 35% Nero d'Avola and 15% white varieties Albanello and Zibibbo. Almost all vines are young because Arianna planted them on her own. But she also added to her holdings 60 years old albarello-trained vines, which she initially rented.
Not irrigating, harvesting late and not using fertilizers are the secret to making more elegant wines in the area. The freshness and minerality in my wines come from the subsoils. Any wine made from young vines or chemically grown vines feeding only off of the top soil will have the cooked, hot characteristics people associate with wine from warm regions.
These days Arianna Occhipinti is famous as a biodynamic winemaker. There is zero irrigation in her vineyards in this hot, windy climate! To protect the vines, she grows cover crops (like fava beans) and other plants between every other row. Arianna tries to minimize intervention in the winemaking process.
Arianna is regarded as a symbol of success in the world of Biodynamic Farming and Natural Wine Making. She has remained committed to those principles while evolving from her originally more dogmatic outlook. Below is her response to importer Jules Dressner's question about her feeling about the term "natural wine":
I make natural wine, but this is a term I'm beginning to be less and less comfortable with, because its implications are very complicated. I really want to stress that my main goal is to make a good wine that reflects where it comes from, and for me the only way to successfully do this is to make the wine naturally. When I first started, people were just starting to talk about natural wine. It was very important to me to think about all these issues, and in those early years I definitely had a more militant attitude about it. Making natural wine was a mission, something worth fighting for. Now that I've grown up a little bit, the mission is making wine of terroir. You have to respect the vineyards, and nature in general. When I wake up in the morning, I want to feel free. Making this wine is my opportunity to feel free. So again, my goal is not to make natural wine, working this way is a process to make good wine.