Occhipinti Terre Siciliane Il Frappato 2018

92+ points Eric Guido (Vinous): "The 2018 Frappato is seductive and perfumed, as crushed stone gives way to violet pastille, sweet plums and hints of grilled citrus. It’s silky in texture, quite savory and vivid, with notes that are sometimes blackberries and at other times cranberries, tinged with saline-minerality and inner herbal notes. The 2018 is persistent, only lightly structured, and packed full of tension with a sweet and sour display of wild berries and lavender that lingers incredibly long. The Frappato ferments with indigenous yeast and spends 30 days macerating on the skins before being refined for 14 months in neutral 25-hectoliter Slavonian oak barrels. I’d recommend another year of cellaring just to soften this expression a bit. Drink: 2022-2028. (Jun 2021)"

Two Glasses, Gambero Rosso: "In just over three decades Arianna Occhipinti has become an icon of Sicilian wine, loved for her talent, stubbornness and passion. But above all, she's loved for her good, indeed outstanding, wines. They are marked by their strong personality, authenticity, originality, and a refusal to conform. In short they are 'Arianna's wines'... We very much aappreciated the juicy and fleshy Frappato '18, a vibrant, meaty and fragrant wine redolent of ripe cherries and sweet Asian spices. It just missed out on Tre Bicchieri. (2021)"

Producer notes: "Il Frappato stems from a dream which I had when I was a girl to make a wine that knows the land that I work, the air I breath and my own thoughts. It is bitter, bloody and elegant. That is Vittoria and the Iblei Mountains. It is the wine that most resembles me, brave, original and rebellious. But not only. It has peasant origins, for this it loves its roots and the past that it brings in; but, at the same time, it is able to fight to improve itself. It knows refinement without forgetting itself." -Arianna Occhipinti