This is a delicate and beguiling wine – light and crisp, yet subtly textural – made from the relatively obscure Sicilian variety inzolia. It showcases the magic that can happen when an emerging producer works with an exciting new variety – and after tasting this, you’ll want to get on board with both Majama and inzolia.
The nose of this wine is immediately intriguing – a delicate and reticent aroma that in turn reveals notes of lemon blossom, freshly cut fennel bulb, sea spray, waxflower, fresh hay, snow pea tendril, lemongrass, and even a faint little hint of spearmint. The body is high-toned and light – it feels crisp and fresh when chilled, but develops a lovely waxy or lanolin-like sheen as it warms up in the glass and opens up with oxygen. The acidity is bright but not focused: a gentle glide along the palate, rather than a laser-like race down the middle. It finishes with a lovely saline note and a judicious little hint of phenolic bitterness. This is not a wine that seduces you from the get-go with obvious fruit characters and easy-drinking approachability, but rather a beguiling wine that resists getting pinned down – just when you think you’ve figured out what it’s all about, it reveals another side of itself. A compelling and delicious mystery.
An ancient white variety native to Sicily, where it is used not only for the island’s famous fortified wine, Marsala, but also as a blending component in a huge number of white wine DOCs such as Vittoria, Menfi, and Contea di Sclafani. When it’s grown in Tuscany, it’s known as ansonica – but it also goes by a typically Italian wealth of synonyms that split the difference between the two (anzonica, insolia, ansolica, ’nzolia …). While vineyard area is declining across Italy, the variety plays an important role in the exciting natural wine scene developing around Lake Bolsena in the province of Lazio, which includes Australian-born vigneron Trish Nelson. In the Australian context, the variety is a relatively recent arrival for commercial purposes, but has generated serious interest as a climate-apt variety for its ability to be dry-grown (i.e. without irrigation) in hot and dry regions such as the Murray Darling, as Chalmers’s ‘Bush Vine’ project demonstrates.
The Murray Darling wine region is Australia’s third-largest wine region, with Mildura as its key town. The region flanks the banks of the Murray, meaning that that region spills into both New South Wales and Victoria. It’s a region known for bulk wine, with ample sunshine and irrigation from the Murray bringing high yields of grapes to reliable ripeness with minimal disease issues. In recent times, a push towards quality has seen some growers reduce yields and focus on climate-apt varieties, with those of Southern Italy a main feature.
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