Arianna has inspired a new generation of wine lovers, having experienced a stratospheric rise to prominence as a cult producer. She now has a burgeoning international following too.

Her career started as a teenager in the cellar of her uncle Giusto Occhipinti’s COS winery, the most famous in Vittoria. His approach to production included organic viticulture, hand-harvesting and native-yeast fermentation, which were a novelty at the time amongst Sicily’s bulk-driven wine producers.

Giusto passed his extensive knowledge onto Arianna, who went on to study oenology in Milan and began producing wine from a single hectare of abandoned vines at her family’s holiday home. Equipped with technical knowledge from university but disillusioned by the emphasis on chemistry and laboratory work, Arianna’s preference was to follow her uncle’s natural approach to winemaking.

She felt this was the best way to express the freshness of the Vittorian microclimate, the minerality of the region’s chalky soil and the purity of the best local grape varieties. Arianna now farms 18 hectares of certified organically grown native grapes. She follows biodynamic farming principles and doesn’t use irrigation, despite the hot, windy climate. All new plantings on the estate are Massale selections. The juice and wine are moved only by gravity and no new oak is used in production. Her wines have an earthy, almost raw quality and are more about finesse than power.