Category: Frappato

Think I’ve only tried a COS bottle once before sometime in the early 2000s. A Pithos maybe. Memories of some lovely crisp fruit and a less than sanitary visit to the farm shed. Subsequent reviews I’ve searched have veered from the spectacular to the worst of down the sink candidates. Hoping for something more the former, a splash of euros on a very recent vintage of a favourite Sicilian grape. Here goes. Opened with a reductive and a yeasty natty edge, not in the sartorial sense. Settled down brilliantly overnight to a sparkling blast of pomegranate, raspberry and waft of the sweetest herbs. So fine a chisel has sculpted bright acidity and such fine tannin, you can’t see the gaps. Perfume and flavour float. When what’s called natural wine these days is this good, it’s like the difference between a live performance and making do with a YouTube version. A bottle of supermarket Cerasuolo looked contrived and sulphur leaden by comparison. Beautiful grapes, simple.

12.% alcohol. Diam. €24 well spent.

94 points.

Another of Dan’s July budget savers. A close up bottle image rather than repeat the seven bottle line up again. Pretty colour label. Italy’s heritage of what seems like thousands of grape varieties is great territory for the nerd, guilty. I just about remember a tasty Planeta bottle of Frappato in purezza and a Cerasuolo di Vittoria where it’s blended with stodgy old Nero d’Avola to bring perfume and life. Not to be confused with Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo of course which is a rosato made from Montepulciano. Love Italian convolution. Good to see this on Dan’s shelves then. Settesoli I also remember were a major player in Sicilian imports in the nineties. Judging from their website, they’re still commercially powerful. Well, this is nothing like the Planeta version I remember, it’s light of weight and took a hour or two to open up after seeming washy and a bit dilute at first. With air it’s seventies disco perfume time. Fragrant with musky rose water, raspberries, almost like a red version of one of those Muscat variations. Bit challenging and odd to the red wine drinker’s expectations. Second day and the perfume’s toned down a notch, more red fruit, sort of New World Pinot Noir in shape and texture but uniquely Frappato in flavour. Spice and volcanic rocks push against the perfume. Good smear of drying skin tannin and an incoming tide of firm acidity. It finally dawned that if you were to drink this fridge cooled with one of those western Sicily seafood couscous, then it would make sense, obvious really. The thought did also occur that if I had tasted this from one of those black Riedel tasting glasses, I think I might of thought it a white made with skin contact such is the surprise awaiting here. Warning, Australian Shiraz it is not.

13% alcohol. One of those odd conglomerate corks with a disc of cork glued each end, why bother? $17.10

Started 87 points but warmed up to an open minded 91. What’s Italian for vive la difference?