Let Nature Speak and Love it Back

Occhipinti
SP68 Rosso 2019
Terre Siciliane IGT
Frappato 70% Nero d’Avola 30%
Vittoria, Sicily, Italy
Organic, biodynamic, dry farming, guyot and Cordon-spur trained, hand-harvested, and native yeasts
Owner and Winemaker: Arianna Occhipinti

Bright, light Christmas tinsel garnet. Just opened the bottle and there’s buttery that fades, roses, flashy cherry, plums, strawberries and cherry starbursts. Sipping cherries, raisins, strawberries, raspberries, and old school orange that in the holidays, your mom would make you cover in cloves and hang in the kitchen. There’s also white pepper, earthiness/darkness and a smooth dry finish. It’s a bottle full of life that could use a steak with chimichuri sauce.

Pairs with Cheez-It’s: brings out more berries like blackberries and blueberries

This is my second Occhipinti (see post) and Arianna is a true wine whisperer. Her respect for every aspect…from the land and whether it’s on an incline, the climate, the vines, the local yeast, and the list can go on and on…is so reverent. She just listens to nature, gives all of it love and care, and let it also do its own thing. She truly loves Sicily and especially her part of world, and she says it best on her site, “Vittoria, wine, vineyard, dry stone walls. This is my land. Early in the morning the sun rises on the Iblei Mountains, while the sky turns red in layers and the warm light spreads amongst the rows of “Fossa di Lupo”, my district. I love the grapes of these places, Frappato and Nero d’ Avola. I feel myself in their expression, in being harmonic and unequal. I love the strength of the know-how to bring in the past and the future at the same time”. I’ve never met her, but through her words and wines, I feel like I am feeling and experiencing just a touch of her land, and honestly it makes me feel so warm in my heart.

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Take Me Home, Country Roads

Occhipinti
SP68 Bianco 2019
Terre Siciliane IGT
Zibibbo (aka Muscat of Alexandria) 60%, Albanello 40%
Vittoria, Sicily, Italy
Organic, biodynamic, dry farming, guyot, hand-harvested, 2 weeks skin contact, and native yeasts
Owner and Winemaker: Arianna Occhipinti

Deep golden color with orange tint. Orange, tangerine, and other beautiful citrus waft in along with a hedge of honeysuckles (I can just see honey bees darting from flower to flower and shaking their little bee butts), wild flowers, and a little fresh grass. Tasting again that orange but blended with some smoke. There’s also honey, peaches, apricot, and, a little bit of a French spice blend like the Bouquet Garni from Penzeys. It’s clean and has a fresh zing on the back of the tongue.

Pairs with Cheez-It’s: Don’t even think about trying that

I’ll start with a quote by Saint-Exupery, that Arianna Occhipinti has on her site, “We do not inherit the land from our ancestors; we borrow It from our children”. What she did inherit was her love for Sicily and the wines from her Uncle Giusto Occhipinti (of COS Winery fame) while helping out in his cellar starting at the age of 16. She also picked up her natural, organic, biodynamic, and reverence for the land from him, even if she did go to oenology school (at 18) for the practical bits. While there she continued to question, made friends with “natural winemakers”, and knew that was to be her path post graduation. As she also says on her site, “Respect the wine as if it was a person. A person who takes with him/her, a world, a history, an atmosphere. And it tastes like the land where it was born from.” This is evident in her SP68 Bianco which is named after the road that winds near her vineyards…a road of deep history that part can be traced back to a 3000 year old stone path which eventually became the oldest wine route documented. When you have a glass of this, just remember a part of this history lives in you.

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WINE MEMORIES 4.23.19

Bichi
No Sapiens 2017
Baja California Mexico
Grape is unidentified, farmer thinks Dolcetto. Louis-Antoine Luy who collaborates with the Téllez family thinks it’s Cariñena.
Biodynamic, dry farming, hand picked, and gently stamped by foot
Project of brothers Noel and Jair Téllez and winemaker Louis-Antoine Luyt

Shiny dark glistening ruby glass. Breathe in the cherry, cola, blueberry, and fennel. Ready to take the sip? It’s full of cherry, salt, smoke, tart plum, and oddly dark chocolate. Yes, I’m not going to lie, when I first found Bichi (which also means naked), I got pulled in by the label on their “Listan”. The same artist (Daniel Pezzi) also did “No Sapiens”. Would love to find his website, but not finding anything, and would love to see more of his creations. Let me know if anyone can point me in the right direction.

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