Palmento Costanzo - Mofete, Etna Rosso, Sicily, Italy (2020)

TASTING NOTES

A bouquet of dusty, red berries with gentle spicy aromas and hints of volcanic ash. On the palate the wine is fresh, with soft tannins and a sapid finish. Elegant, silky, savoury with tense acidity.

These 5 to 30 year-old, bush-trained vines are planted at an epic 2,230 - 2,460 ft. above sea level on the north-facing side of Mount Etna, on volcanic sand and rock. Grapes are painstakingly hand-picked and fermented in stainless steel tanks. The resulting wine underwent about 10 days of maceration on skins, with daily pump-overs during the first week and then aged in stainless steel and neutral oak barrels.

Located on the northern slopes of Mount Etna in the Santo Spirito area of the town of Passopisciaro, the newly renovated Palmento-Costanzo winery opened in 2011. With over 100 terraced slopes, 14ha in total, rising from 600-800 metres, the vines – some more than a century old – are supported on wooden trellises surrounding the ancient winery. The vineyard and winery have been brought back to life in a meticulous and sensitive restoration based on the principles of bioarchitecture and with attention to local history and a carefully researched revival of traditional production techniques. (Bioarchitecture is defined as a philosophy of building, restructuring and living which aims to establish a balanced, sustainable relationship between the natural environment and construction). The winery follows the traditional winemaking techniques, ‘a caduta’ (top-down), that starts receiving grapes from the roof, continues in the winemaking barrels and finishes in the aging, underground.