Why it matters
The producer
The family label is Gurrieri. The estate behind it is Azienda Agricola Battaglia Graziella, nine hectares of organically farmed vineyards on calcareous hillsides in Chiaramonte Gulfi, in the Ragusa Province of southeastern Sicily. Vincenzo and Graziella Battaglia planted and tended those parcels for nearly four decades before their children Giovanni and Angela produced the first commercial release in 2010.
The wines carry native Sicilian grapes: Nero d'Avola and Frappato for reds, Grillo for whites, with Syrah as the single international variety. The estate's most important bottle is the Cerasuolo di Vittoria DOCG blend, a 55 percent Nero d'Avola and 45 percent Frappato wine from Sicily's only DOCG zone, a classification that requires exactly this pairing of the island's two most planted red varieties.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
Chiaramonte Gulfi sits at the northeastern edge of Ragusa Province, on a ridge in the Iblean plateau country of southeastern Sicily. The town rises between 260 and 300 metres above sea level, high enough that summer heat breaks at night and the growing season runs cooler than the island's lower coastal zones. That altitude difference shows in the wines: freshness, acidity, and aromatic lift across the range rather than the heavy fruit and high alcohol more typical of Sicilian lowlands.
The soils are calcareous, limestone-derived and well-draining. They hold warmth without waterlogging and push vines toward deep root systems, producing grapes with mineral character and natural acidity.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
Organic farming across all nine hectares means no synthetic herbicides or pesticides. Soil management is active: organic matter is returned to the earth and drip irrigation supplements the limited annual rainfall without overwatering. Harvesting in two passes through each plot selects fruit at different ripeness windows, which gives the cellar cleaner, more consistent raw material per variety.
In the cellar, temperature-controlled fermentation preserves aromatic freshness in all the wines. Reds go through longer maceration periods, extracting colour and tannin without over-drying the fruit, then through malolactic fermentation to soften acidity. Ageing is in wooden barrels for wines that benefit from oxygen exposure, stainless steel for those where freshness is the priority. The Grillo, with its citrus and green apple profile, goes into steel. The Cerasuolo di Vittoria blend, which requires more development, sees wood.
Wines to know
The range in view
Grillo is the white wine: a single-variety bottle from the native Sicilian grape grown on calcareous soils at altitude. It opens with citrus peel and green apple, carries herbal notes through the mid-palate, and finishes with the bright, saline acidity the variety produces at this elevation. No oak, no heaviness. It is a wine for the table.
Fragpato is vinified as a varietal red, and the variety's character dominates: floral on the nose, pomegranate and berry fruit in the mouth, with tea-leaf and spice trailing into the finish. The tannins are light. The colour is pale for a red, almost translucent at the edge.