Schietto Chardonnay 2012 - Terre Siciliane I.G.P. - Dei Principi di Spadafora

The noble Spadafora family has been producing wine for decades, but it was only in the 1990’ies that the family decided to begin bottling and marketing of the wine grown on the estate, where previously the wine has been sold in bulk. After testing and tasting the wines produced, the current owner Francesco Spadafora decided in 1993 that the estate should only produce wine from grapes grown on his land. Today the winery has 95 hectares of vineyards around Monreale growing both indigenous and international grapes.

The Chardonnay vines for the Schietto white wine has an age of 22 years and grow in the sandy and clay vineyards in contrada Virzì in Monreale to the southwest of Palermo in western Sicily. The grapes are grown at an altitude of 400 m in an area subject to a temperature variation of 10-15°C between day and night which improves the maturation and the acid-sugar balance in the grapes.

The manual harvest of the grapes takes place in August, in three different moments, because the grapes are grown on a long, exposed ridge to the north, which has varied ripening times. The decision to harvest at separate times is in order to integrate different levels of sugar and acidity in the must. Fermentation takes place in cement vats, where the fresh must is also added to the first must that is already fermenting, in order to prolong the process. Only at the end of fermentation, and after racking, a small part of the wine is it put into small casks where second fermentation- the malolactic fermentation, occurs naturally, with the malic acid being transformed into lactic acid. This gives the wine its characteristic elegance, together with a hint of vanilla. 30% of the wine was aged 3 months in oak barrels and the rest in stainless steel, after blending the wine rested a year in the bottles.

Longevity 5-10 years