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| Occhipinti “Il Frappato” Terre Siciliane 2021 Manulea Rendina “Zahia” Terre Siciliane 2022 Gurrieri Frappato Terre Siciliane 2021 Manenti Frappato Vittoria DOC 2021 Frappato is a red grape variety that is native to the southeastern corner of Sicily and while hardly obscure, I could scarcely fault you for having never heard of it as varietally labelled frappato is a relatively recent phenomenon. Historically, Sicilian growers have employed frappato as a blending partner with the much better known nero d’avola grape to make the classic wine of the region, Cerasuolo di Vittoria. Yet unalloyed frappato is a variety that, even in a hot climate, can yield a fresh, perfumed wine with the slightest suggestion of tannin. It’s a grape that that can produce just the sort of lighter-bodied wine that takes well to a slight chill and seems to work beautifully with a range of things we like to put in our mouths in Southern California, but as far as I know no intrepid grower has planted it in our state. That’s a shame as I suspect (this from the perspective of an armchair vigneron with an overactive imagination) that it would perform well here. In its homeland it’s mostly planted on a deceptive soil type of dusty, fine red clay but if you scoop a bit of soil away with your hand in the vineyard, as Arianna Occhipinti showed me, you quickly expose a layer of pure limestone—limestone is high pH, and high pH soils tend to paradoxically produce wines with fresh acidity. I don’t know if this limestone environment is entirely responsible for frappato’s vibrant, mouth-watering acidity or if this is intrinsic to the grape itself, but in any event the vibrancy of the grape will be on full display tonight. |