Mortellito 'Cala Nìuru' 2023 Rosso Val di Noto Terre Siciliane

750ml bottle

12% abv

If you've had other Frappato that are quite fruity and floral, the Cala Nìuru is a bit more angular: salted cranberry, pomegranite, and blueberry are present, but the minerlity really shines through. Light and spritzy and excellent with foods like pasta alla norma and arancini.

Cala Nìuru is a blend of mostly Frappato with a touch of Nero D'Avola, classic southwest Sicilian varieties. The desert climate is on the coast of the Ionian Sea with white limestone and karst soils. The grapes are grown organically, macerated on the skins for 3-4 days, and then aged in stainless steel for 6 months. 

75% Frappato and 25% Nero d’Avola
FARMING: Certified Organic Bioagricert ITBIO007B05H 
VINEYARD: 4 Ha
ELEVATION: from 40 m / 131 ft to 80 m / 263 ft
SOILS: medium texture limestone
VINE AGE: from 5 to 10 years old
VINE TRAINING: alberello (bush vines) for Nero d’Avola, Guyot for Frappato
HARVEST DATE: mid September
YEASTS: Native
FERMENTATION & ÉLEVAGE: Frappato stays on the skins for 4 to 7 days, and Nero d’Avola for only 1 night. The entire fermentation lasts 15 to 20 days. Élevage for 6 months in stainless steel tanks.
MALOLACTIC FERMENTATION: Yes
SULPHUR: 10 mg/l added during fermentation; 20 mg/l at bottling 
ANNUAL PRODUCTION: 1,000 cases

Mortellito [MORT-el-li-to] in Val di Noto*, in the corner of Sicily that lies at the same latitudes as North Africa’s arid desert climate. Its vineyards are a few kilometers from the coast, with groves of ancient olive and almond trees shielding the wind from the sea. Abandoned and working fishing ports dot the landscape.

Owner Dario Serrentino has always enjoyed the contrasts of this coastal growing area, which he calls ‘a desert next to the beach.’ Over the years, lucky for us, he’s learned to coax extremely elegant wines from this receding coast of limestone which, he says, has ‘the magic to produce wines with tension, freshness, and complex salinity.’

In Dario’s best vintages, his rosso and bianco wines have a tapering, svelte finish, cool and salt-dusted. Drinking them is akin to a dive into the nearby Ionian sea on a hot summer day.

Dario has always worked on the family farm in one form or another (his heirloom almonds were actually his first love). He changed careers from social worker and part-time farmer to full-time vignaiolo with his first bottling in 2014.

He works only with native grapes, including an herbal Frappato, and a spicy-sour bush vine Nero d’Avola. His whites are acid-driven and aspirin-chalky in texture: the Grillo often has a nose of toasted nuts and citrus rind, the Moscato di Alessandria is floral and herbal (la sua morte, ‘it’s death,’ as the Italians like to say, is a pairing with raw fish crudo).

There’s never been any chemical interventions in the vineyards, and there’s an intentional hands-off approach in the cellar, with a minimum of sulphur added at bottling. Avoiding the entrapments of the glou-glou or overwrought luxury style, Dario is part of a very small contingent of producers in Sicily producing fine and natural wines, or as Dario poetically likes to say: mare e terra in vino.

* Val, confusingly, doesn’t translate as ‘valley’ in this instance; instead it most likely come from the Arab or Latin meaning, ‘Governor’ of Noto or ‘Territory’ of Noto.