Acosta "Versante Nord" Nerello Mascalese, Terre Siciliane '19

Eduardo Torres Acosta, a young winemaker from the Canary Islands, first began working with vines in Tenerife where his father had a small plot of land. In 2012 Eduardo moved to Sicily, where he interned at Azienda Arianna Occhipinti and then he got a job as the enologist at Azienda Passopisciaro, one of the pioneers of Etna’s new wave of producers. In 2018, Eduardo was able to convert a small Etna garage into a winery but has decided to keep the wines IGT. 

Today he works eight small parcels totaling 4.5 hectares, and the main production is a wine called Versante Nord, produced in both white and red. Both wines are sourced from six parcels totaling less than two hectares on the cooler, north-facing side of Mt. Etna (hence the name) at elevations ranging from 750 to 950 meters. In traditional style, the vineyards are mixed plantings of various local varieties. The red grapes include a majority of Nerello Mascalese with Nerello Cappuccio, Alicante, Garnacha and others.

Made mainly of Nerello Mascalese, with a small amount of Nerello Capuccio, this wine comes from vines that average more than 50 years in age and are albarello trained, either as individual bushes or on wires depending on the parcel. The soils are sandy volcanic ash. The grapes are hand harvested. The wine was vinified with a combination of whole cluster and destemmed berries, fermented with native yeasts, and macerated for 15 days. It was aged for 16 months in concrete tank with minimal racking, then bottled without fining or filtration.