Saturday TNs: A mini-vertical of Passopisciaro Contrada S

I have been wanting to do this for a while, and while I was cleaning up and reorganizing in the cellar recently, I stood up a few of these to check them out. Sciaranuova is a vineyard on a lava field on Mt. Etna, and according to the label it’s about 850 meters above sea level.

2009 S - Sweet & sour cherry fruit on the nose. Light-bodied, with good acidity. This is drinking well now, but feels like it can easily handle another decade if you want to continue to hold it.

2011 S - Very lightly colored in the glass, which I find to be typical of most wines made from Nerello Mascalese. Red fruit & menthol on the nose. Interesting - this feels more mature than the '09 on the palate, although this also seems to be capable of additional bottle aging. The acidity here is a little more pronounced as well - the nose here is more nuanced that the first wine, but the palate doesn’t seem as harmonious.

2012 S - Tart cherry fruit on the palate - this is pretty tasty. More menthol & red fruit on the nose.

2014 S - Best nose of the four wines; complex, with a brooding character and a minerality that I hadn’t noticed in the previous three wines. The kind of nose where you can savor and focus on different aspects for a while. Also the most expansive wine on the palate - I don’t follow the vintages in Sicily like I would in either Tuscany or Piemonte, but this strikes me as the ripest wine in terms of grape maturity. Lovely.

One thing that is apparent across all four wines is the consistency - not sure if that is reflective of the vineyard or the “house style” of Andrea Franchetti, but all four wines shared similarities. I know that the Terre Nere wines from DeGrazia seem to get a lot more airplay on the board, but the Passopisciaro wines tend to be more in my wheelhouse - light-bodied, almost always leaning towards the red fruit side of the spectrum, always displaying pretty decent acidity, and at least in my experience, never tiring to drink. My better half is making a pizza and a calzone for dinner, and these wines should work just fine with that type of meal.

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