Tasting Note: Il Frappato 2007, IGT Sicilia, Ariana Occhipinti

I’ve been a fan of Arianna Occhipinti’s wines for close to two years, now, since I tasted her nero d’avola, Il Siccagno, at Terroir SF, with a couple of friends I’d met at the first Wine Bloggers’ Conference (read the blog post, in French, right here). Since then, the wines have started to be imported to Quebec by Oenopole, and I managed to get my hands on some Il Frappato, made from the indigenous sicilian variety of the same name.

Frappato is usually used as a blending tool with nero d’avola, Sicily’s best known red grape, but when you taste it on its own, you wonder why we don’t see more varietal bottlings. In Ms Occhipinti’s able hands, it is, in any case, an absolute knock-out.

Nothing in this open and aromatic, delicate and yet assertive cuvée seems to stand in the way of the grapes’ natural aromatics. Every bit of this natural wine, made with no sulfur until bottling, is expansive, complex and fluid.

The fluidity, the everchanging character of this wine is truly remarkable. Every time you think you have it pinned down, it throws something else at you.

Here you are smelling cherries, and in come the figs, the raisins, before a whiff of fresh-cooked strawberries runs by. Pepper? Or is that smoke? Or maybe dried leaves. Or… no, maybe more blood orange. And then there’s that floral character. A little volatile acidity is there, but it gets completely swallowed up by the swirl of aromas that keeps dancing around in the glass.

The wine is from the Southern tip of Italy, on the west coast of Sicily, yet its color and demeanor are more reminiscent of Burgundy. Tannins are discreet and remarkably silky, acidity is refreshing – nothing much like the very ripe, concentrated style that you might often see in modern Sicilian winemaking.

But here is the kicker. My jaw almost dropped to the floor when Arianna Occhipinti told me this, when she came to Montreal on a promotional trip around North America, but 70% of the frappato is macerated for two months – two months! – on its skins, while the other 30%, in the 2007 vintage, stayed on its skins for eight months – eight months!! As she simply explained, the reason that the wine stayed on its skins for so long is that it kept evolving well, as she tasted and retasted it. Practice trumps theory every time.

Arianna Occhipinti in Montreal, last April.

Shouldn’t that make the wine more tannic, more deeply coloured? According to her, after a while, the skins seem to reabsorb the solids and tannins, and the wine rolls on to a smoother, more open stage. Hard to contradict her when you look at the light, clear garnet color of the wine and its smooth texture.

Any assumptions you might have about winemaking in a hot climate also go out the window regarding harvesting: she picks the reds in October, fairly late. The rains that come in September, she says, help balance out the grapes and, therefore, the wines. Again, hard to contradict her when you taste what’s in the bottle.

One of the other things I learned, when I met her, is that she is starting to make some wines from  zibibbo (muscat of alexandria, as it’s otherwise known) and albanello, with the former furnishing the aromatics, and the latter offering a more austere disposition. Somehow, I have a feeling that tasting that wine could also do away with a certain number of preconceptions.