Let me tell you how I first encountered Arianna Occhipinti's wines. About a decade ago I was outside on my porch, having a little lunch — I like a long lunch — and decided to crack open a tester bottle of her straight Frappato. Three hours later, a friend turned to me and asked: "What are we drinking?!?!?" That question, asked with genuine bewilderment and genuine pleasure, is the best possible review any wine can receive. And it is the review Arianna Occhipinti's wines have been earning ever since. Now I want to tell you about her SP68 Rosso — a different wine, a blend, but carrying the same soul. First, the origin story. Because with Arianna, you cannot separate the wine from the woman. Arianna caught the winemaking bug at sixteen, working summers at her uncle's winery in Vittoria, Sicily. Her father, attempting to do the responsible thing and redirect his daughter toward a more conventional future, struck a bargain: graduate from architecture school, and he'd give her a vineyard to manage. She graduated. She demanded the vineyard. What she got was one acre of fifty-year-old, diseased Frappato vines behind the family home in Vittoria. She calls what followed a privilege — the privilege of nursing those vines back to health, of learning from plants nearly three times her age. I would call it a recondite and slightly insane act of devotion. Almost needless to say, she farms everything biodynamically, by hand, herself, on the sun-hammered limestone soils of southeastern Sicily where the Mediterranean breezes come off the sea and keep everything honest. From that one diseased acre, Arianna Occhipinti has become one of the most important winemakers in Italy. Rajat Parr, Eric Asimov, Jancis Robinson — the serious voices in wine have been following her for years. And the reason is not buzz. The reason is the bottle. The SP68 Rosso — named for the Strada Provinciale 68, the provincial road that winds past her vineyards — is her introduction to this philosophy. A blend of Frappato and Nero d'Avola, native yeasts, concrete tanks, no oak theatrics. Just fruit, limestone, Mediterranean air and Arianna's obsessive attention to what the vines are actually trying to say. In the glass: wild strawberry, sour cherry, blood orange, crushed herbs, rose petals and a hint of Mediterranean scrub. The palate is what I've always called "iron and silk" — iron being the resonant tension between vinous tannins and juicy acidity that I love in great Italian reds, silk being the elegance of a graceful fruit character that sits lightly on top of those tannins like fine cloth draped over the nape of your neck. The finish is long, mineral and quietly, limpidly beautiful. It has the perfume of Pinot Noir. The brightness of Cru Beaujolais. And a character so unmistakably Sicilian that comparisons to anywhere else ultimately feel beside the point. I believe Arianna Occhipinti will one day be spoken of alongside Conterno, Soldera and Valentini — the true masters of Italian wine. This bottle is the most accessible entry point into that world, at a price that has no business being this reasonable. Open it with grilled swordfish, pasta alla Norma, roasted eggplant, wood-fired pizza, or simply good friends around a table on a warm evening. And when someone turns to you and asks "what did you just pour me?" — you'll know you've done something right.
