Occhipinti

The Free Bacchus Story

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

What she planted was what nobody else wanted. Frappato, Nero d’Avola, Zibibbo and Albanello on the red sands of Vittoria, at a point when Sicily was selling weight and colour to an export market that expected both. Frappato is pale, thin-skinned and light, which is precisely why it had gone into retreat. It is now the grape she is best known for bringing back.

The flagship is called SP68, after the Strada Provinciale 68 — the provincial road running between Vittoria and Pedalino, past the vines.

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

The estate is certified organic and has farmed biodynamically across every hectare she owns since 2009. It has grown a long way past that first hectare without the farming being diluted on the way, which is the harder half of the story — scale is where most conversions quietly acquire exceptions.