L'Archetipo, "Susumante, Rosato Brut" 2021

Puglia, Italy. One of our favorite non-pét-nat pink bubbles of the summer, made from 100% Susumaniello. Grapes are destemmed, crushed and fermented with native yeasts. The fermenting juice is transferred to large stainless steel pressure tanks where the residual sugar is converted to CO2 in tank. After light bâttonage, a touch of SO2 is added before bottling unfined & unfiltered. 

In the southeast of Italy, Puglia has long been a region - in wine terms - known for the production of bulk red wines produced from vigorously yielding, intensely tannic grape varieties such as Negroamaro & Primitivo. Due to no fault of its own aside from being an extremely fertile sliver of plains and subtle valleys squeezed between the Ionian and Adriatic seas, the region's historical cash cropping and exploitative growing has cast a long shadow. With that being said, there have been modern champions of this region for whom returning to purer approaches to farming, and particularly wine-growing, has been the paramount project of the day. Another way of stating "purer approach to farming" would be to say - returning to natural archetypes, a vision that is a kind of idyll beyond modern manipulations. For Francesco DiBenedetto and his family, the folks behind the project "L'Archetipo" this vision was only achievable through a "synergistic" agriculture that emphasized elements of biodynamic farming and the sustainable no-plowing growing practices of Masanobu Fukuoka. The sum result of this endeavor has been a 50 hectare farm, 30 dedicated to vine, that has been immaculately farmed in this manner for nearly 40 years in the quintessential Puglian town of Castellaneta just upland from the Gulf of Taranto. The wines possess something special and really do seem to thrum with the purity endemic to this historic place that finds itself on an ancient seafaring route, halfway between Spain and Jerusalem. Working with Puglian varieties that have found common modern expression in addition to ones seemingly lost to time -- as is the case with this wine in your share, composed of 100% Susumaniello -- the L'Archetipo wines have been, for us, a revelation in the past year.