The Planeta 2019 Sicilia Passito di Noto (in a 500-milliliter bottle) is a delicately fragrant dessert wine with orange blossom or zagara, sweet almond paste, honey and night-blooming jasmine. What I like about this expression of air-dried Moscato Bianco is that the wine is never cloying or overly sweet. This opens the wine to more ambitious pairing possibilities such as aged or sharp cheeses or salty cold cuts. The wine sports a generous mid-weight style with nicely balanced acidity. This vintage shows nice fruit concentration too. Production is 22,000 bottles.

The 2018 Passito di Noto (packaged in a 500-milliliter bottle) opens to a beautifully luminous color with bright golden highlights. You get Sicilian candied orange peel, sweet almond paste and lots of fragrant honey. This wine is absolutely seductive and delicious. Pair it with dried biscuits or cassata with candied fruit.

Made with Moscato Bianco, the 2017 Passito di Noto (packaged in a 500-milliliter bottle) is weighed down by the hot and dry conditions of the vintage. The wine offers medium sweetness and richness followed by apricot, honey and jasmine. This vintage does not quite reach the complexity or the depth of cooler years.

The 2014 Sicilia Noto Passito di Noto is showing very nicely. Grapes are harvested at the end of August and are air-dryed in plastic crates that each hold five kilos of fruit for 40 days. During this time, they lose half their water weight and the sugar concentration is greatly increased. This creamy dessert wine made exclusively from Sicily's fragrant Moscato Bianco reveals bright notes of peach, tangerine skin, almond paste and honey. There's a lot of sweetness here for sure, but the wine never feels cloying or too heavy.

Made exclusively with Moscato Bianco, the 2013 Passito di Noto (500-mililiter) is a very attractive and moderately complex dessert wine. It shows a higher level of detail and finesse than other passito dessert wines produced in Sicily. By the way, Planeta also makes a dry white wine from the same grape variety. But this wine is much more interesting thanks to its pinpoint aromas of dried sage and Mediterranean herb, followed by fragrant honeysuckle and passion fruit. The sweetness is pronounced and the 2013 vintage is less impactful in terms of acidity. With some 30 hectares of vines, Passito di Noto is one of the smallest DOC appellations in Sicily.