Description
From vineyards located in Baronia, Sicily, this Musita 100% Cabernet Sauvignon Terre Siciliane DOC is a brilliant crimson in color. The Nahla's bouquet is fragrant and intense, showing abundant red fruit and berry aromas with lively notes of tea and black pepper confirmed on the full, elegant and appealing palate. The hand-picked cabernet sauvignon grapes are placed in boxes containing 33 lbs., then de-stalked and are macerated on the skins for 72 hours at 46.4° F. After that the grapes undergoes slow fermentation at 73.4° F with timer-regulated pumpovers and racking after 12 days’ alcoholic fermentation. This is followed by malo-lactic fermentation. The wine is then fine-tuned in stainless steel vats and, partly, in oak barrels for eight months.
Don Ignazio Ardagna began the winery in the 19th century in Salemi, Sicily, planting his first, tiny vineyard on the Musìta slopes with native, bush-trained Catarratto grapes. These golden fruits flourished, leading to a family business decades, if not centuries, strong.
In the beginning, Ignazio’s son Domenico, then his grandson Giuseppe, cultivated grapes for the local cooperative. But Giuseppe Ardagna dreamed that his children and grandchildren would one day tell the story of Musìta as Ignazio had meant it to be told, by expressing the hill’s tremendous quality potential to its full extent. Today, Ignazio and Giuseppe’s aspirations have been achieved: the family has not only purchased the hillside winery that at one time belonged to the cooperative; they have also renovated and expanded it, reaching nearly 125 acres (50 hectares) under vine. The estate is entirely family-run and every stage of the process is supervised by expert agronomists and enologists.
The Musìta mission is to showcase the unique qualities of their terroir. The vineyards are partly located on the Musìta hill itself and partly located in other hilly locations around Salemi, at varying altitudes, some as high as 1,640 feet above sea level. Besides the variety first planted by Don Ignazio (Catarratto), the winery also cultivates Grillo, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Nero d’Avola, and Merlot. The soils in the Baronia Vineyard, which produce Musita’s Cabernet and Chardonnay, are clayey and calcareous, which provide body and structure to the grapes. The climate is dry and hot in the summer and this helps ripen the grapes and build excellent aromatics.
