What Is Zibibbo?

For years we have been producing Muscat as a sweet fortified wine with fruit from our Muscat of Alexandria vineyard. A few years back we decided to make a refreshing, semi sweet style of wine from the free run juice of our Muscat grapes. The free run is the first run of juice that we collect from our freshly crushed grapes from the press, and tends to be lighter and more delicately flavoured than the juice that runs off after a full pressing. Since we were already making a wine called Muscat in the traditional Australian style, Robert knew he had to find another name for this new wine to avoid confusion, and found that Sicilians call similar wines Zibibbo. To our knowledge, there aren’t any other wineries in Australia calling a wine Zibibbo, and this is backed up by the fact that everyone who visits our cellar door asks the same question ‘What is Zibibbo?’. This almost defeats the purpose of Robert finding that new name for the wine (!), but it does tend make our wine unique and memorable for those who try it.

The Zibibbo is a semi-sweet, floral, tropical, ‘alfresco’ style of wine with plenty of natural ‘muscaty’grape flavour. It is a very likable wine and is great for those who don’t have a taste for dry wines, or for those who do and feel like something a little different. Unlike the majority of our wines, we don’t advise putting Zibibbo in the cellar for long, as it definitely shows it’s best as a young, lively, fresh wine. Robert likes to have the wine chilled on warm sunny afternoons sitting on the verandah, matching it with melon wrapped in prosciutto (try it if you’ve never had it, it’s a great sweet/savoury combination) or with foie gras, and Jarrod will tend to drink it mostly with his favourite spicy Asian foods. Brendan no doubt nips some from the tanks whilst the others aren’t looking on hot days late in vintage to help him endure the classical and jazz music that mysteriously starts playing on the CD player in the winery. It makes for a great aperitif, or perhaps we should say ‘aperitivo’ style of wine as well.