Etna Bianco, Pietradolce, Sicilia 2023
I don't intend for this to become a wine blog, I just happen to have had a few bottles recently and I want to write about them. We'll be back to wrestling and other nonsense soon, I'm sure.
In the meantime...
It's my partner's birthday this week so today we opened a bottle of wine to celebrate, a Sicilian Carricante produced by Pietradolce. Their vineyards extend for 30 hectares on the northern slopes of Mount Etna between the Contrade Rampante, Zottorinoto, Santo Spirito and Feudo di Mezzo, at an altitude of between 650 and 950 meters above sea level. A further 2 hectares are on the eastern slopes of Mount Etna, in Contrada Caselle in the municipality of Milo at 850 meters above sea level.
We've had two holidays to wine regions this year - one to Sicily for a wedding, and one to Carcassonne for my birthday. In both cases we really struggled to find good local wine, and found much better wines from the region once we were back in the UK. I'm not sure why that was the case.
This is my first time with carricante and it has immediately become one of my favourite white wine grapes. It's bone dry, the finish bringing a flood of saliva with it, but the acidity is perfectly balanced so that you feel you could drink it forever. I haven't encountered many easy-drinking dry whites, but this is definitely one of them.
One the nose it's all green apple. Some of that comes through on the palette but most of what I'm getting is a very gentle peachiness with some pleasant salinity, and an almost effervescent tingling that lingers long after the flavours have subsided. This is one of those wines that's dangerous, because it disappears without you realising you've drunk it.
Big fan of this one.