Musìta

Musìta Winery

Location: Salemi, Province of Trapani, Sicily, Italy

Musita was founded in the late 1800s by Don Ignazia Ardagna in Salmei. Today the winery has 125 acres under vine.

Points of Differentiation

• The winery has been entirely family run for five generations
• Excellent value for quality wines
• Appealing, easy to drink, easy to pair wines
• An elegant taste of Sicily with gorgeous packaging
• Hot, dry climate produces grapes with excellent aromatics
• Slope of the vineyards allows grapes to ripen evenly with body and structure

The History

Don Ignazio Ardagna began the winery in the 19th century in Salemi, Sicily, planting his first, tiny vineyard on the Musìta slopes with native, bush-trained Catarratto grapes. These golden fruits flourished, leading to a family business decades, if not centuries, strong.

In the beginning, Ignazio’s son Domenico, then his grandson Giuseppe, cultivated grapes for the local cooperative. But Giuseppe Ardagna dreamed that his children and grandchildren would one day tell the story of Musìta as Ignazio had meant it to be told, by expressing the hill’s tremendous quality potential to its full extent.

Today, Ignazio and Giuseppe’s aspirations have been achieved: the family has not only purchased the hillside winery that at one time belonged to the cooperative; they have also renovated and expanded it, reaching nearly 125 acres (50 hectares) under vine.

The estate is entirely family-run and every stage of the process is supervised by expert agronomists and enologists.

The Musìta mission is to showcase the unique qualities of their terroir.

The Terroir

The vineyards are partly located on the Musìta hill itself and partly located in other hilly locations around Salemi, at varying altitudes, some as high as 1,640 feet above sea level. Besides the variety first planted by Don Ignazio (Catarratto), the winery also cultivates Grillo, Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Syrah, Nero d’Avola, and Merlot.

The soils in the Baronia Vineyard, which produce Musita’s Cabernet and Chardonnay, are clayey and calcareous, which provide body and structure to the grapes. The climate is dry and hot in the summer and this helps ripen the grapes and build excellent aromatics.