2018 Cottanera Barbazzale Catarratto Sicilia 750 ml

The Sicilian Estate Wine Advocate Is Watching...

Every sommelier from New York to California is fighting over allocations of the Sicilian wines that make it to our shores. 

When it came to the 2018 Cottanera Barbazzale—an electrifying white bursting with volcanic minerality, citrus zest, and soulful notes of limoncello, verbena, and bitter almond that are ready to transport you to the base of Etna—we weren’t going to lose the fight. 

Sicily provides the perfect confluence of singularity and value, and its shores yield bright, light-bodied wines that are perfect for lovers of crisp, un-oaked white wines like Sauvignon Blanc, Grüner Veltliner, Albariño, and Pinot Gris. 

This 2018 Cottanera Barbazzale Catarratto Sicilia is grown on lava stones in an incredibly unique, eruptive terroir. At just $20, you’d be hard-pressed to find a white wine with this much complexity, and we guarantee there will be sommeliers fighting you for our allocation, especially when you consider Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate called Cottanera “an exciting winery to watch.” 

It’s the Catarratto grape—native to Sicily and grown extensively on Mt. Etna—blended with a tiny percentage of Viognier, that gives this wine its striking floral character, while Etna’s lava stones and alluvial soils provide the characteristic crushed rock minerality and fantastic acidity that make this wine incredibly food-friendly.

The Cambria family, makers of Cottanera wines, have been vintners on the slopes of Mt. Etna since 1962. And in the last two decades, they’ve transformed their vineyard and viticultural practices, replanting as many as 153 acres exclusively with native grapes like Catarratto. The shift represents more than an update. It signifies a return to tradition, to the true roots of Mt. Etna—the best it has to offer. The result hasn’t gone unnoticed by the wine world. 

For now, the good press hasn’t caused a shift in Cottanera’s pricing structure, which remains extremely reasonable. But like the mercurial Mt. Etna, which by the way is an active volcano and could erupt at any moment, things may not stay the same forever.