MATTI EXTRA DRY

Matti Extra Dry is perhaps the most individual and most deliberately eccentric wine that Raffaele Noviello produces at his Scarpa estate — a wine that carries in its name and its production protocol the particular personality of a winemaker committed to experimentation without apology. Matti — mad or crazy in Italian — is both a self-deprecating acknowledgement of the wine's unconventional nature and a declaration of pride in it.

The production is specific and deliberately unusual. The grapes are 100% Fiano, whole-cluster pressed and inoculated with selected yeasts, fermented at controlled temperature in the standard manner — and then the conventional path ends. The end of fermentation and the prise de mousse — the secondary fermentation that creates the wine's effervescence — occur directly in the bottle rather than in tank or autoclave. This ancestral or pet-nat style of sparkling wine production is among the oldest in the world, predating the Champagne method by centuries, and its application to the Fiano grape of Irpinia is an act of both historical consciousness and genuine originality.

The wine is bottled during the night between October 3rd and 4th — a specific calendar precision that suggests both the importance of timing to this production and the slightly theatrical personality that the name Matti promises. At approximately two bars of pressure at the end of fermentation in bottle, the wine carries less effervescence than a conventional sparkling wine — a lightness of bubble that makes it more versatile at the table and more complex on the palate.

Caution is advised when uncorking — a practical instruction that also functions as one of the more appealing pieces of label copy in the UniqueWines portfolio. Matti Extra Dry is a wine for the curious, for the experimental, for those who find the boundaries of conventional sparkling wine categories to be more interesting when crossed than when observed.

Available through UniqueWines.