From: Sicily, Italy
Varietal Grecanico
Tasting Notes: This is the sisters' skin-contact white, but it just gets a fleeting kiss from the skins -- 13 hours -- rather than days, as with many orange wines. But that's all it needs to develop its lovely texture and complexity. It smells like pine trees and their resin - like those umbrella pines baking in the Mediterranean sun that you find all over the Sicilian coast. So basically this wine smells like the coast of Sicily in the summer -- not a bad start. But the palate delivers as well - rich and sunny tasting, it tastes like juicy peach and orange juice with a hint of almond and ginger and a briny saltiness on the finish. Not a huge amount of acid, but enough to keep the ripe fruit flavors from becoming cloying.
Pairing: This lovely orange wine pairs with everything from veggie dishes to grilled chicken (check out the recipe below!) to a killer cheese plate. Of course, seafood is a natural fit with wines like this one: fish tacos, clam pasta, pan-roasted fish fillets with herb butter, tuna melts, blond puttanesca (linguine with tuna), crispy tuna, cod, or crab cakes are all easy pairings that will be fantastic this time of year.
Gingery Grilled Chicken Thighs With Charred Peaches
By Melissa Clark
About. Cantina Marilina Sikelé Orange is a skin-contact natural wine made from 100% organic Grecanico grapes grown in Noto, Sicily, on limestone soil. The grapes undergo a 13-hour maceration on the skins before pressing, and then they are fermented spontaneously in concrete vats with indigenous yeasts. Sikelé Orange is aged for six months in concrete and three months in bottle and is unfiltered, unfined, and with minimal addition of sulfites upon bottling.
After 25 years making wine for other people, in 2000, Angelo Paternò pounced on a piece of land in the southeastern Sicilian province of Siracusa that he declared one of the best viticulture areas he'd seen in Sicily (the area is also a UNESCO world heritage site). Today, his daughters, Marilina and Federica, run the show with Angelo, who is still helping in the cellar.
Deeply influenced by Frank Cornelissen, Etna’s godfather of natural winemaking, the Paternò family has always farmed organically and made wine with minimal intervention in the cellar (no additives, low sulfur). They’ve created a vibrant polyculture to ensure ecosystem stability, with only 35 out of the 60 hectares on the property planted with vines; the rest of the land is used for mixed farming. And they’re making insanely fresh, quaffable, and expressive natural wines - a rarity in this land of bulk Nero d’Avola and flabby whites (it gets hot here).
