BARRACO
Grillo 2020
Sicily, Italy
From an isolated plot of fifty year old bush vines handed down to Nino by his father. These are planted over red sand and terra rossa, just a kilometre from the sea. The wine spends two days on the skins before a fermentation in steel and ten months of élevage in concrete vats. This is as old-school as they come, a compact and powerful wine, with a distinctively nutty, saline character.
Grillo
ABOUT THE PRODUCER
Nino Barraco has been instrumental in rewriting the story of wine in Marsala.
Nino took over his family’s vineyards in 2004 and from the outset he has done things differently, working organically, focussing on the native grapes of his Western Sicily and producing single vineyard wines in the hope of showing others the region’s true potential.
He has spent the past few decades acquiring small parcels and now farms a total of twenty hectares of vines spread along the coast north and south of Marsala. Nino’s work is tireless and he can usually be found driving his beat up Fiat through the dunes to check on his vines. There he works organically and with a great respect for nature.
In the cantina his aim is simply to guide the wine from vineyard to glass. Whilst the majority of his wines are bottled the year after harvest, in his parent’s garage, Nino has embarked on a project to rediscover the Marsala of old. Here, old casks of various sizes hold oxidative wines in various stages of evolution. They are left to evaporate for up to a decade, producing highly concentrated wines of astounding length and complexity.
Nino’s wines possess an uncanny sense of place. Salty, sunkissed and radiant, they are as Nino says, the sea in a glass.