Petracavallo, "Bianco d'Alessano" 2021

Where the arch meets the heel in Italy’s boot, in a town perched high above the crystal-blue Gulf of Taranto, amidst a landscape of Mediterranean scrub, deep limestone ravines and wooded hills of hardy pine and oak, a father and son are quietly making some of our favorite light, bright, seaside Southern Italian wines. Vito & his father Peppino D’Onghia work together here in their family’s longtime home to develop modern wines of tradition – an intentionally oxymoronic sound to the phrase. These are the wines that, Vito eagerly offers, of which his grandfather would give him sips as a boy. The kinds of wines that, from time immemorial, were the honest fruits of the land – alcohol hovering around 10.5-12% ABV, the cooling winds off the Gulf of Taranto often tempering the otherwise abundant sun of the Italian South. Expressions of local Pugliese grape varieties – fiano, bianco d’alessano, negroamaro, & of course, primitivo are sometimes given to skin contact, sometimes not, depending on the ripeness of a vintage or the intensity of a curiosity sparked when the grapes hit the cellar. Wines with real ease and a kind of soulful hospitality – you get the feeling, somewhere in a bottle of Petracavallo, of someone smiling on the other end of things.

100% Bianco d'Alessano, a local variety of Puglia. The grapes were hand-harvested, macerated for a few days on the skins, and fermented with wild yeasts in stainless steel. Aged in stainless and bottled unfined, unfiltered with no SO2.