Occhipinti

The Free Bacchus Story

Arianna Occhipinti started in 2004 with one hectare in Contrada Fossa di Lupo, and she was twenty-one. Her uncle Giusto had co-founded COS nearby — two generations of the same family working the same corner of Sicily from opposite ends of a career.

She works the grapes of Vittoria: Frappato and Nero d’Avola for the reds, Zibibbo and the rare Albanello for the whites, on red sand over white limestone. Sicily was long known for selling weight and colour, with much of its Nero d’Avola going to France to deepen thinner wines. Frappato is pale and light, crops low and ripens late, and with co-operatives paying about 15 euro cents a kilo for grapes, growers pulled it out. Some were paid subsidies to uproot. It is now the grape she is best known for bringing back.

Her best-known wine is called SP68, after the Strada Provinciale 68 — the provincial road running between Vittoria and Pedalino, past the vines.

Naming a wine after a road number is an unusually literal statement about place, and a deliberate refusal of the vocabulary the category normally reaches for.

Frappato is worth meeting on its own terms, because very little else tastes like it. It is a red wine that behaves like a lighter one: pale, low in tannin, red cherry and blood orange with a dried-herb thread running underneath, and it wants a slight chill — not a thing most people expect to be told about red wine. Her vineyards lie in the far south-east of the island, about 20 kilometres from the sea. Summers there often pass 40°C, and rain rarely tops 300 millimetres a year. That such a place turns out one of Italy's most refreshing reds is the real surprise. The reason is underground. White limestone beneath the red sand keeps the soil cooler and releases water slowly through the driest months.

The estate is certified organic and farmed on biodynamic principles, without a biodynamic certificate. She is candid that the biodynamic side has not been continuous. She used the preparations for three years, stopped for a spell of what she calls natural agriculture only, and brought them back as the farm grew.