A slightly chilled down liter bottle with a crown cap is just the thing for an aperitivo or an impromptu dinner, and our importer friends at PortoVino have been searching for the right producer for their Italian liters for a while. They knew they wanted wines with buckets of low alcohol deliciousness, yet not in that international glou-glou style where the soil, grape, and terroir gets washed out. Enter: Sfera. Sfera’s at once terroir-driven, but also an interesting take on liters, and bottling wine in general. As they say on their quirky site: Cosmic Verve in a Grounded Italian Liter…From the Alps to the Mediterranean. Sfera collaborates with multiple small certified-organic farmers around Italy to bottle liters in limited runs, and are keen to give the producer credit by clearly putting the winery’s name and providence on the back label. This all means that the producers change, but front labels don’t. Another constant is that the wines are naturally made, and strict criteria for quality and transparency. It’s a win-win: small certified organic producers get to do a fun liter project, and we get to explore Italy.
From the Alps to the Mediterranean, SFERA is a collaboration with small, certified-organic farmers to bottle liters in limited runs. The winery behind this rosato is Cossentino, a second-generation family operation located an hour outside Palermo, in Partinico, on the hills overlooking the Gulf of Castellammare. Their vineyards are planted in red sand and red clay in a sort of amphitheater where the wind benefits the grapes all year long, and especially during the hot summer days, when a cool breeze comes in from the sea. Nero d’Avola here grows very slowly and the natural ventilation helps to maintain lower alcohol and a medium structure – no overblown, teeth-staining, jammy wine here. Grapes are directly pressed, co-fermented, and spend 10 months in steel tanks before bottling; no clarification maintains the naturally dark, cranberry color of the wine. Loaded with tight and mineral-flecked red berries, pomegranate, lime zest, scrubby herbs, and dried red flowers, it really stands out for it’s decidedly savory finish, a saline flourish that recalls of the vines’ coastal proximity and the fact that this entire area was once seabed. The 1 liter format says this is a wine that is easy to drink, and the mouthwatering combination of freshness, salty tang, and bright fruit make it so, but there’s still enough body and structure to that this is absolutely suited for the dinner table.