Young Sicilian wineries tap into ancient flavours The Cerassuolo di Vittoria ($48) is a good Sicilian red with deep earthiness and round maroon fruit. Picture: cosvittoria.it/english THE COS winery in Sicily is barely 30-years-old, much like the modern Sicilian wine industry. But co-founder Giusto Occhipinti (he's the O in COS) is finding great success using techniques lifted straight from the island's earliest history of winemaking more than 3000 years ago: the COS cellar is home to 150 huge clay amphorae, buried to their necks in the earth, used to ferment and mature both white and red wines. "The ancient Greeks introduced the amphora to Sicily," says Giusto. And now we are using them again. It wasn't always back-to-the-future at COS. When Giusto and his partners started in 1980, they were committed modernists: COS was one of the first southern Italian companies to adopt the practice of ageing wines in small, new barrels called barriques - a technique that is common across the world and imbues the wines with a seductive flavour of dark, toasty oak. But Giusto eventually became tired of how the barriques smothered the flavour of the grapes. It became increasingly apparent to him that imposing too much homogenous winemaking artifice - such as new oak flavour - was missing the point of wine being, ideally, just fermented grape juice, unique to where it's grown. "It is a worry," he says, "when oenology is trying to create fantasy flavours that in nature don't exist." So he went looking for alternatives. "The most interesting trip I made was at the end of the 1990s to (the former Soviet republic of) Georgia," he says. Here, I discovered winemakers who had never stopped using amphora since ancient times. I tasted wines that had been sitting on their skins in amphora for four years, with nothing added, that tasted incredible. I had discovered a whole new world, new emotions. I taste the amphora difference by trying two 2010 vintage red wines from COS side by side. The first is Cerasuolo di Vittoria ($48), a blend of the local nero d'avola and frappato grape varieties, fermented in concrete tanks with temperature control. It's a very good Sicilian red: the deep earthiness and round maroon fruit of the nero d'avola is balanced by bright raspberry aromatics typical of the frappato grape. Then I taste the 2010 Pithos Rosso ($60), also a blend of nero d'avola and frappato, fermented and aged in amphorae without temperature control or any additions. And while the flavours are similar to the more conventionally made Cerasuolo, they're wilder, more characterful and exciting. The deep grapey texture of the nero d'avola is chewier on the tongue, the raspberry lift of the frappato is more vivid and thrilling. There's a transparency to the amphora wine, too - not visually so much (although it is a light, luminous red in the glass) but in the flavour: you can "see" the soil and the heat and the country when you taste it; shimmering haze over the vines, dusty earth underfoot, Mt Etna looming on the horizon. As Giusto says: "By reviving an old tradition, we start to give an identity to the wine." cosvittoria.it/english enotecasydney.com