Oh Can't I?

For the next few weeks, we'll be tasting wine a bit above my usual spending ceiling, thanks (be to heaven) for Astor Wine's monthlong inventory reduction scheme, er, 25% off sale. Where it really paid off to be a white wine drinker: while collectors may have cleared them out of major reds, the whites were pretty much left for the likes of you and I. I went a little mad. But there should be some fun ahead as I explore some of the classic French whites of Burgundy and the Loire, some enticing prospects from Austria and Spain, and some exotic new Italian bottles, such as Gulfi's 2003 Carjcanti. Hailing from Sicily, where the wines get better, and sadly more expensive, every year, this is a schizophrenic wine. I expect soft, honey flavours from Sicilian whites, due to the heat, but am often pleased by the balance they present with good acids cutting through any potential blowsiness. This wine takes it to an extreme. The smell is like walking through an orange grove a little after the sun has gone down, dusty, woody and gently warm, with a sense of lightness after the heat of the day. The first taste keeps you there, breathing orange blossoms. Then the oak kicks in and totally takes over, dominating and sending my brain little "eek" alarms. Just when I'm totally ready to hate the wine, a suprise turns up on the very long finish, pure fat lemon acid. It is 100% Carricante, a Sicilian varietal I have not encountered before; I agree with about half the flavour profile provided by the vineyard: The wine features a firm, fragrant and steely aromatic profile, with notes of grapefruit, almonds, anise and chalk. The wine shows tight and ostensibly young structure on the palate, framed by vibrant acidity, resinous white fruit and dusty minerality.
Granted, this was a 2003, which was an unusually warm year, and it may be less overblown in other vintages. I paid $14.24 at Astor, where is it normally $18.99 and where I won't be adding it to my splurge list.