“MACERATED CATARRATTO”…NATURALLY!

The orange wine of Casa Vinicola Ferracane is born: the wine of memory that looks at the peasant past of a Sicily of other times with the eyes of the present!

It is called simply…or rather “naturally”…“ Macerato Catarratto ”, it is the latest creation from Casa Vinicola Ferracane and represents the new challenge of the winemaker from the Bosco district!

After Guanciabianca and Elisir, Fabio Ferracane offers another version of a wine coming from the same native vine with enormous potential. “Catarratto wine produced in purity is sometimes underestimated – explains Fabio – or at least not valued enough. Catarratto, on the other hand, has always been a grape variety that has a very important structure, with a thousand facets and qualities that our grandparents had already understood in the past, it is no coincidence that the peasant production of the past in Marsala was largely made up of Catarratto grapes and the same wine that the Marsala farmers drank in the past was largely Catarratto.” This reflection led Fabio to continue on the path already undertaken with Guanciabianca and Elisir to produce a Catarratto always in purity but with an additional novelty: – “This time I wanted to propose a very special wine that takes us back in time, to the memory of the Marsala farmers, of our grandparents, to how they made wine. Or almost. In fact, it is not an oxidized wine but an “orange wine” with 17 days of maceration on the skins with indigenous yeasts (native to the grape) and with just 12 ... mg/l of total sulphur dioxide, exclusively that which is produced completely naturally during fermentation.”

In Marsala they also call it “farmer’s wine”. The Contrada Bosco winemaker starts from this idea, from the wine his grandfather made, produced in a more evolved version. Combining innovation and tradition, remembering that wine, Fabio Ferracane uses his present winemaking skills to take us on a dive into the past. “All orange wines require a lot of manual work and a lot of care of the vineyard in order to obtain very healthy grapes, an essential condition for producing natural wines. The grapes of Macerato Catarratto – Fabio specifies – come from the vineyards of Contrada Bellusa and this year were harvested in the third ten days of August. Natural fermentation follows and in the absence of selected yeasts. The prolonged maceration on the skins allows the extraction of tannins from the Catarratto grapes, obtaining a wine with pronounced tannins with a high dry extract that can also worthily accompany meat-based dishes and that can be served at a temperature of 16°/18° as is the case for red wines.”

Once again it is the company philosophy of “slow cultivation” that inspires Fabio Ferracane in the production of the grapes that give life to this new type of wine. Once again passion, simplicity and tradition combined with the desire to enhance and express an ancient vine, make “Macerato-Catarratto” a wine of memory that tells the ancient and intense relationship between the winemaker and his land, a “new” and at the same time ancient wine that looks at the peasant past of a Sicily of other times with the eyes of the present!

Marcello Scarpitta

Press Office