Description
Arianna Occhipinti Frappato comes from 2 different property plots with vines with an average age of about 40 years. One plot is made up of older, sapling-trained vines on a more sandy version of the estate’s clayey-limestone soils; the other is younger, trained in Guyot on soils with more limestone.
The vines are grown with organic and biodynamic methods and harvested by hand. The fruit is de-stemmed but the grapes are left whole for pressing; the fermentation is with indigenous yeasts in a concrete tank with 30 days maceration. The wine is first aged for 8 months in 25-hectolitre Slavonian oak barrels and for another 8 months in concrete tanks, before being bottled unfiltered.
Arianna Occhipinti Frappato is a joyful and fragrant wine, elegant, fresh and mineral. Long and clean finish with a nice savory complexity.
Arianna Occhipinti is a young winemaker who launched her first vintage in 2004 at the age of 21. A cult figure of the biodynamic movement, Arianna treats 14 hectares of olive groves and 5 hectares of vineyards on the land around Vittoria, in south-eastern Sicily.
Occhipinti has built its reputation on Frappato, a secondary grape in Sicily usually used to revive the heavy Nero D’Avola. Arianna, with tenacity and stubbornness, has shown that Frappato can give great results even in purity.
