2019 Riofavara "Nsajàr" Terre Siciliane IGT

This wine is so rad and one of our favorites!! A blend of rare and unusual Sicilian varieties of Cutrera, Rucignola, and Recunu

The Riofavara estate, located on the southern tip of Sicily, is just a few minutes down the road from the town that gave Nero d’Avola, the seminal grape of Sicily, its name. The Padova family has tended vines here for almost a century, but only in 1993 did they begin bottling their own wine. Massimo Padova became among the first to pioneer quality in a region where bulk production was the norm, lowering yields and focusing on organic farming to get the most of this chalky, sunbaked land a stone’s throw away from the Mediterranean.

“Nsajàr” means “to try something new” in the local dialect, and this wine is the epitome of creating something new from something old. Massimo decided to resurrect three nearly extinct Sicilian white grape varieties, Cutrera, Rucignola, and Recunu, which he felt would be well suited to the warming climate thanks to their high natural acidity. The 2019 represents the first vintage of this exciting project and the results are more than promising. It is a bracingly fresh bianco, offering notes of citrus zest, crushed stone, and pine resin, that finishes on an intensely chalky note from its limestone terroir. Massimo believes this to be the only bottling of these three grapes in the world!