Pettineo PT - 2017
Arianna Occhipinti
- Region
- Italy » Sicilia » IGP Terre Siciliane
- Type
- red still, dry
- Producer
- Arianna Occhipinti
- Vintage
- 2017
- Grapes
- Frappato
- Alcohol
- 12.5
- Sugar
- 1
- Volume
- 750 mL
- Cellar
- not available
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.
Pettineo (PT) is a few kilometers from Bombolieri and Fossa di Lupo. This 0.9-hectare plot features the oldest Frappato vines (60+ years) in all of Vittoria. They grow on 70 cm of fine orange sand over tufa (a porous limestone) and are a mix of albarello and guyot training. This site is the first of the three to be harvested. According to Arianna, The wines of the Pettineo are usually fruit-driven with a more silky tannin yet possessing quite lively acidity.
Arianna Occhipinti's Frappato PT is a red wine of great substance: a red wine of great substance: juicy, sour and sanguine, a drink of extraordinary vivacity. Expression of the frappato in the Pettineo district, the finest, between exhilarating fruit and great elegance.
— Tripple A
Destemming, maceration on the skins and spontaneous fermentation in 85 hl concrete vats for 25 days with daily pumping over and punching down. Racking and ageing in the same containers for 6 months and in Austrian oak barrels for 12 months.
Ratings
4.3·@Wix Kyiv Office · On the road between two winds: Arianna Occhipinti
More than two years passed since the last time I tasted PT '17. And I remember it as the most fruit-forward from the three contrada. This time it reminded me of some mix of Burgundy and Otago.
Anyways. What a lovely charming and flowery bouquet of red fruits dominating black fruits, jam, mushrooms, green herbs and wet earth. It's a delicate, multilayered and juicy wine with a long and flavourful aftertaste. Beautiful evolution in the glass.
4.4·@Boris
Wonderful Frappato. More fruit-driven than other contrade, but very elegant and youthful. Dark cherry, pomegranate, forest floor and blood sausage. Fresh, silky and almost perfectly balanced.
4.4
What a beautiful expression of Frappato. Unlike BB and FL of the same vintage, this one is more fruit-forward, exploding with ripe dark cherry, pomegranate and very distinct bloody touch. Almost perfectly balanced, silky and crisp. Flavours of cherry and meat. Just a pure joy to drink. Shame it's so young.
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.