Mortellito is in Val di Noto*, in the corner of Sicily that lies at the same latitudes as North Africa’s arid desert climate. Its vineyards are a few kilometers from the coast, with grooves of ancient olive and almonds trees breaking the wind off the sea. Abandoned and still working fishing ports dot the landscape. Owner Dario Serrentino has always enjoyed the contrasts of this coastal growing area, which he calls ‘a desert next to the beach.’

Over the years, lucky for us, he’s learned to coax extremely elegant wines from this receding coast of limestone, which, he says, is ‘the magic to produce wines with tension, freshness, and complex salinity.’  In Dario’s best vintages, his rosso and bianco wines have a tapering, svelte finish, that’s cool and salt-dusted.  Drinking them is akin to a dive into the nearby Ionian sea on a hot summer day.

Dario has always worked on the family farm in one form or another (his heirloom almonds were actually his first love). He changed careers from  social worker and part-time farmer to full-time vignaiolo with his first bottling in 2014. He works only with native grapes, including his herbal Frappato called Nìuru, and an old bush vine Nero d’Avola called Tuttu. His whites are acid-driven and aspirin-chalky in texture: the Ìancu is a Grillo often has a nose of grilled nuts and citrus rinds that begs for fish, especially crudo; his riserve bottling of Grillo called Ponente is one of the island most serious whites wines (and, yes, that includes Etna).

There’s never been any chemical interventions in the vineyards, and there’s an intentional hands-off approach in the cellar, with a minimum of sulphur added at bottling. Avoiding the extreme entrapments of the glou-glou or overwrought luxury style, Dario is part of a very small contingent of producers in Sicily producing fine and natural wines, or as Dario poetically likes to say: mare e terra in vino.

* Val, confusingly,  doesn’t translate as ‘valley’ in this instance; instead it most likely come from the Arab or Latin meaning, ‘Governor’ of Noto or ‘Territory’ of Noto