Ah! Italia! Had it not been for the wretched pandemic we would now be but a month or so away from packing our bags to attend a wedding in the hills to the north of Rome. Wouldn't that have been great.. There is a slim chance it still may be possible, provided the Italian government change the rules at the beginning of September. If they don't we will have to continue to use exploration of the world through wine as a proxy for a more personal experience. With that in mind:
Let us imagine ourselves on the sun-kissed shores of Sicily, on the western coast close to Marsala, sipping a red wine made from local grapes (Shirley Valentine has just popped into my head, but I think she went to Mykonos) and enjoying the evening sun, setting over the Mediterranean Sea. Nice, innit?
The wine would be a blend of two varieties grown on the island and in very few other places. The growers would be from a family that established the vineyards in 1904 and who, almost exactly a century later, had teamed up with a winemaking family from Brescia to build a winery and take control of the end-to-end production.
What we have here is both a blend of grapes and a blend of families, who turn the juice from those grapes into the wine of the week. The families are, firstly, the local growers, named Caruso and, secondly, the Minini family from Brescia in Lombardy. They bring viticulture and vinification together.
The grapes are Frappato, which brings a lightness, acidity, and berry fruit flavours, and Nerello Mascalese, providing the structure and body. Both of these have been hand-picked, destemmed and fermented in stainless steel tanks for two to three weeks, before undergoing malolactic fermentation in the same. The wine is then aged in a mix of 225 litre barriques (30%) for four months and stainless steel for eight months. After all of that it has a labelled abv of 13.5%.
Back in the real world the wine was tasted not on a balmy Sicilian evening to accompany a mixed plate of local antipasti, but in front of the television with little more than a bowl of cashews, whilst watching a rerun of what the BBC, or at least many of their presenters, seems to believe was called the Erlympics, where 'Team GB' done really well. For all of that *sigh* both the sport and the wine that accompanied it were very enjoyable and my any measure, a great success. Medium body, fruit and acidity nicely balanced, alcohol well integrated, good subtle tannin, nice length.
Buy it again? Yes.
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