2010 GRILLO

1) Varietal composition: 100% Grillo.

2) Vintage Detail: It has been a good vintage because Spring has been rainy, and Summer very hot, with few grape for each plant (about 2kg for plant)- the time of harvest has been the first decade of September.

3) Vineyard specific information: It is located in Western Sicily, in C.da Spagnola (Marsala),  at 6m on sea level. The soil is calcareus inclined to the dissolved. The installation of the vineyard has been on 1998. The type of trellising is espalier Guyot. The yeld is about 70-80 q.li/ha.

4) Vinification 2010:

 The harvest of grapes has done by hand and put in chests of 15 kg; later the grapes are brought to winery, they are destemmed and subsequently are placed in tanks suitable where is the cryomaceration film at 4°C, for more then 8 hours. After, the grapes are kindly pressed, and the stum obtained is launched to the static sedimentation and next fermentation with selected yeasts at the controlled temperature of 14-16°C. Once the fermentative action in stainless steel receptacles has finished, the wine is left to rest on the lees purposes for about three months. The bottling is done in the first days of  March of the year following the production.  

5) Winemaker notes: The wine shows from straw yellow color an from the bouquet is wide and persistent with agrumate notice. To the taste is presented sapid.

Couplings: wine for the whole meal; it well accompanys white meat. Excellent the combination with fish, crustaceans and soft cheeses.

Service temperature: 13-14° C.

6) Technical data, including at minimum:

    a) alcohol percent: 13,23%vol

    b) ph 3,12 and total acidity 5,50g/lt

    c) residual sugar 2,90 g/lt

7) Production: Bottles produced n.2700 of 0,75 lt

8) First release date: Since the beginnin of  March 2011 the wine is ready and packed in cases of 12 bottles or 6 bottles.

HISTORY AND PROSPECTS

When you trace the history of wine in Sicily, you encounter two scenarios in antiquity:

That of Greek Sicily where grapes, together with olives, became the most important agricultural product, and that of Carthaginian Sicily wich concentrated on the cultivar of grain.

This distinction remained after the Roman conquest of Sicily, and even if the Empire’s growing need of grain increasingly eroded the land area dedicated to the cultivation of grapes, the exploration of Sicilian wine to gaul and Spain s well documented by the numerous amphorae of Mesopotanium, Inikos, Biblinum and Mamertinum wines and others.

The Barbarian kingdoms first, and then Arab conquest, stimulated the production of grain reducing viticulture to monastic farms, perpetuating, in the absence of a communal phase, the existence of the large estates, thus rendering still more marked the dichotomy between the cultivation of grain and that of grapes. For this reason Sicily could never enter into the favourable trade in wine fed by the great fleets which left Gironde to cross the Atlantic. This explains why, at a time when the foundations of the great French and Spanish viticultural industries were being laid, Sicily remained in a subordinate position, its trade in wine limited, the monopoly of able Jewish, Genoese and Lombard merchants.

There was some development of viticulture towards the end of the eighteenth century when the barons, who wanted to put waste land areas of their estates to productive use, obtained from the king the right to establish communes with a consequent concession of land to the peasants that favoured the planting of vineyards. In the mid nineteenth century, Woodhause, a soda ash merchant, noticed similarities between Marsala wines and Port and Madeira. After a first shipment of Marsala to England proved popular with English consumers, he began, together with other English investors, to develop the viticulture of the western part of Sicily.

The present organization of viticulture in Sicily no longer mirrors that of those days but the economics history of the island nevertheless permits us to identify collective attitudes and predilections with regard to the production of wine which have been determined by demographic and social changes and by ideology and religion.

Sicily puts its trust in the viticulture of individual companies and of their men, helped in this by the success of New World wines, both by the sharing of many sensorial descriptors wich have relaunched Mediterranean type wines, and secondly by the role of terroir in the communication of quality.

The history of Sicilian wines is a tale of light and dark, of knowledge and ignorance, of serenity and passion, not on a human but on a mythical scale.

Panoramic views from our vineyards

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