This is a year of great vitality in the vines, fertilized by a rainy winter, followed by a lot of heat during the summer. The long period of rain during the first days of October weakened the skins, a malignant cloud hung and dripped moisture for weeks. Dew shone on the grapes every morning. The rain brought mold and other problems, so to keep the grapes healthy we went back to the vines after thinning to clean the grapes, bunch by bunch, grain by grain.

We could have waited longer for the vines at high altitudes to push ripening even further thanks to the altitude, the cold, the scarcer bunches, and lots of propolis to keep them healthy; in this district, we collected our selection of old vines for this bottling on October 27, the last day of the harvest. Nerello wines are good, variety, mineral and salty wines. The vintage is not like 2012, nor 2014, but it paints a complete and structured picture of Etna, with a good skeleton, high acidity, and low alcohol.

Vinification: 15 days in steel tanks. Malolactic fermentation: in large oak barrels. Aging: in large oak barrels for about 18 months. Bottling: during the waning moon of April 2017.