Winemaker Notes
#25 Jeb Dunnuck Top 100 of 2025
Thanks to the cool and rainy spring, Passorosso 2023 stands out for its great freshness and elegance. On the palate, it offers a dynamic and engaging drinking experience with silky tannins and fragrant acidity, making this wine very inviting to enjoy starting from its youth. Thanks to an impeccable balance, Passorosso 2023 promises a long life in the bottle.
Professional Ratings
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2023 Etna Rosso Passorosso is designed not as an entry wine but to represent the totality of what the vintage has to offer. It opens with pretty and mineral-driven notes of dusty earth, savory, peppery spice, ripe raspberries, and orange. Medium-bodied, it has fine tannins, a zesty lift of orange peel, and notes of cranberries and smoky earth.
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James Suckling
Fruity and leathery with aromatic depth, showing ripe blackberries and strawberries. This has medium body and firm, crisp acidity that’s almost sour. Despite the youthfulness,chewy and slightly chalky tannins are polished in the finish. Drink or hold.
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Vinous
The 2023 Passorosso is a pretty and perfumed effort with dusty rose and wild strawberry tones offset by a whiff of ashen stones. It's lifted and fresh in style with tart raspberry and tantalizing acidity adding a subtle inner sweetness toward the close. This tapers off with a pleasantly chewy sensation and hints of hard red candy that linger on.
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Wine Spectator
This medium-bodied red is light on its feet and mouthwatering, with good focus to its flavors of raspberry coulis, pomegranate puree, chopped rosemary, cocoa powder and leather. Lightly chalky tannins define the spiced finish. Nerello Mascalese.
Extending across the variable volcanic soils of the slopes of Mt. Etna at some of the highest vineyard altitudes in all of Europe—up to 3,300 feet—Nerello Mascalese is one of Sicily’s most noble red varieties. It makes a beautifully aromatic, firm, cellar-worthy but pale-hued red often comparable to a fine Burgundy or Barbaresco. Somm Secret—Nerello Mascalese takes its name from the black color of its grapes, nerello, and the Mascali plain between Mt. Etna and the coast where it is believed to have originated.
A large, geographically and climatically diverse island, just off the toe of Italy, Sicily has long been recognized for its fortified Marsala wines. But it is also a wonderful source of diverse, high quality red and white wines. Steadily increasing in popularity over the past few decades, Italy’s fourth largest wine-producing region is finally receiving the accolades it deserves and shining in today's global market.
Though most think of the climate here as simply hot and dry, variations on this sun-drenched island range from cool Mediterranean along the coastlines to more extreme in its inland zones. Of particular note are the various microclimates of Europe's largest volcano, Mount Etna, where vineyards grow on drastically steep hillsides and varying aspects to the Ionian Sea. The more noteworthy red and white Sicilian wines that come from the volcanic soils of Mount Etna include Nerello Mascalese and Nerello Cappuccio (reds) and Carricante (whites). All share a racy streak of minerality and, at their best, bear resemblance to their respective red and white Burgundies.
Nero d’Avola is the most widely planted red variety, and is great either as single varietal bottling or in blends with other indigenous varieties or even with international ones. For example, Nero d'Avola is blended with the lighter and floral, Frappato grape, to create the elegant, Cerasuolo di Vittoria, one of the more traditional and respected Sicilian wines of the island.
Grillo and Inzolia, the grapes of Marsala, are also used to produce aromatic, crisp dry Sicilian white. Pantelleria, a subtropical island belonging to the province of Sicily, specializes in Moscato di Pantelleria, made from the variety locally known as Zibibbo.