Our alcohol monopoly, Alko, is always at the very front line of wine trends. Natural wine was hyped elsewhere maybe starting a decade ago and today Alko received its first natural wine. But gladly it is one of the good ones.
Cerasuolo is a blend of Nero d’Avola (yawn) and Frappato (yay!). I’ve never been a huge fan of Nero d’Avola since it all too often makes a big, plummy, soft, neutral but fruity wine. Frappato is kind of its opposite: light and acidic even in the Sicilian heat, fragrant and nervous. Put the two together and gladly with these better ones it’s the Frappato that still shines through.
COS has always been good but I must confess his niece(?) Arianna Occhipinti has usually made wines even more to my taste. But I’m not complaining about this 2013 Cerasuolo. The scent is really lovely: intense raspberry/cherry/some type of red berry aroma, lovely earthy savouriness (or is it that everything here smells of damp earth and leaves since I’ve been preparing the substrate for some millipedes arriving tomorrow?
). Crisp and tannic with vivid fruit that seems somehow both incredibly full of flavour and as light as a cloud. This texture is what I love about the best natural wines: they seem both incredibly full bodied and incredibly light bodied in the same sip.Buy again? Even at Alko’s prices yes. I appreciate COS and Frappato very much. And though I’m very tolerant of and even sometimes love the freakier end of the natural spectrum, this COS is not freaky at all. It’s just really good wine.