Lamoresca Nerocapitano Frappato 2025

‘Nerocapitano’ is what the locals here call Frappato, with fruit for this bottling hailing from a twenty-five-year old-parcel planted over clay and limestone. On the vinification front, Fillipo is very much driven by maintaining the delicacy and lift of this local specialty; the wine spends just a brief week on skins before being transferred to concrete vats for 8 months of settling. Vibrant and wildly Mediterranean in its nose, this is the kind of wine people refer to when speaking of something transportational; you can sense the unmistakable “Sicilian-ness” of the wine in the scorched, dusty clay, sun kissed red fruits, heady wildflowers, curing meat, and ocean breeze. This year’s is an absolutely killer rendition, with cherry skins, freeze-dried strawberries, lavender, and a shake of black pepper rounding out the intense aromatics; on the palate, bright acid on the back palate leads to a crisp, dry finish, highlighting the structure and finesse that you find in most other Frappatos in the market. Perfect with a slight chill, this would serve you well mealside from start to finish — though you’d probably finish it long before the main course.

Filippo Rizzo and his wife Nancy met over a decade ago while Filippo owned and operated a small restaurant in Belgium. With a passion for non-manipulated and additive free wines and family ties in Sicily, the pair made the decision to return to the land the best way they knew how, by becoming vintners. Their 11 hectare farm, five of which are under vine, is located squarely in the middle of nowhere, on a raised patch of rolling hills in the southern-most corner of the province of Catania, between Etna and Gela on the southern coast, and is the only winery for roughly 50 square miles. Here, vines of up to sixty years of age are planted over a mix of limestone, sand and clay at an elevation of 430 meters above sea level, allowing a dramatic swing in temperature between day and night, a boon in this typically hot and dry Mediterranean climate. Vineyard work is organic and the approach to winemaking is practical, with the aim to provide vibrant expressions of Sicily’s characterful grapes – no dogma, just wines made from fully ripe grapes, that offer complexity, density and balance.