Mortellito “Cala Iancu" Bianco 2022 Terre Siciliane
Mortellito “Cala Iancu" Bianco 2022 Terre Siciliane
750ml bottle
13% abv
VARIETIES: 90% Grillo and 10% Catarratto
SPONTANEOUS FERMENTATION: Yes
SULPHUR: 10 mg/l added during fermentation; 20 mg/l at bottling
ANNUAL PRODUCTION: 1,000 cases
TASTING NOTES: white pear, sea shell, saline, with zippy acidity
A mineral-focused blend of Grillo and Catarratto, featuring aromas of fresh oranges, sea spray, and white flowers. The palate is full of zesty lemon, bright acidity, and stony minerelity. Perfect with fresh seafood.
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.
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