Variety: Nerello Mascalese 80% - Nerello Cappuccio 20%

Origin:  Etna DOC, Sicily, Italy

Tasting Notes

The colour is Bright ruby red. The nose is rich with a riot of aromas: fruit in alcohol, cherry jam, dried rose and violet, black pepper, tobacco, bitter cocoa, liquorice, leather, mentholated balms and smoky notes of volcanic ash. The mouth has vigorous but integrated tannins, great freshness and good flavour.

Wine Making

Serena Costanzo manages the company together with her parents Valeria Agosta and Mimmo Costanzo. This wine as made by consulting Sicilian winemaker Salvo Foti. In the winery, the groups from various parcels of land are vinified separately to  capture the soul of the volcano's different expressions. The vats and barrels chosen seek purity of expression: stainless steel, tonneaux and large barrels have been selected to ensure that the essence of wood would not overpower the natural richness of the grape. The vine-training system is sapling supported by chestnut poles. The vines are up to 100 years old planted at an average 7000 per hectares. Harvest is by hand. Fermentation is in truncated cone-shaped oak vats with indigenous yeasts with malolactic fermentation. Aging is for 24 months in large oak barrels before 12 months in the bottle.

The Vineyard

Located in the Cru of Contrada Santo Spirito, Palmento Costanzo has been creating wine in their reclaimed winery since 2012. They tend to their bush-trained vines, some of which are over 120 years old, farming organically with focus on preserving biodiversity in their vineyards. With the establishment of the Etna DOC in the 1960's came an end to the historic practice of making wines in Palmento - a stone structure carved out of the mountain itself, where winemakers of yesteryear pressed their grapes into volcanic stone vats. Italian wine bureaucrats forbid this practice due to hygienic concerns - making wine in the Mountain itself was too hard to keep clean. Recently, under the guidance of Etna's most renowned viticulturist and enologist, founder of I Vigneri, Salvo Foti,  Palmento Costanzo has reestablished their own palmento and works with an understanding of nature to create elegant and expressive wines. They are authentically born from the « Muntagna », as Etna is fondly called by its inhabitants. They also purchased of a handful of hectares in Contrada Santo Spirito , located in Passopisciaro, in the province of Catania, on the northern region of the Etna. The site is an ungrafted vineyard , one of the few that survived the phylloxera epidemic at the beginning of the 1900s which destroyed most of the vineyards in Europe.