Description
Wine Details
SP68 is a road but it is also a young wine. Cool and pleasant, with a delicate taste that it brings the flavour of the sun and the freshness of this land.
Alcohol Grade: 12%
Aging/ Vinification:Â fermentation with only indigenous yeast and skin maceration for 15 days. Aging of 6 months in concrete vats, 1 month in bottle, unfiltered.
Best to have it: 14-18ºC
Size: 750 ml
The Winery: Agricola Occhipinti
Arianna is the niece of Giusto Occhpinti, whose COS wines are undisputedly amongst the very best of Sicily. In 1998, Giusto invited her to help him out at Vinitaly for four days. Arianna was 16 at the time and knew nothing about wine; the experience was such a good one that she decided to study viticulture and oenology in university. This quickly proved counter-intuitive, since everything she had learned from her uncle (organic viticulture, hand-harvesting, native yeast fermentations) clashed with what she was being taught in school.
In her early 20s, she began making wines in her home area of Vittoria, Sicily. Frappato amazed her: a grape capable of making floral, elegant reds, so different from the big, ripe overpowering Nero d’Avolas that had so far defined Sicilian wine. She decided her style would be one of finesse and elegance and perfume over power. Her first vintage (2004) was released in 2006 when she was just 24. At the time she had just one hectare of vines.
Continually pushing things forward, Arianna built herself a new cellar in 2014, a huge step up from the cramped, chaotic space she used to work in. Besides the obvious advantage of having more space, it has permitted Arianna to start a new regiment of concrete fermentation and aging for both “SP68″‘s, which used to to be produced in stainless steel and fiberglass.
