GRAPPA
FIERY FRIEND OF PEASANTS, NOW GLOWS WITH A QUIETER FLAME.
Through uncounted decades, grappa was little more than a cheap, portable form of central heating for peasants in northern Italy.
A shot (or two, or three) after dinner helped ward off the damp, misty cold that often settles over the Alpine foothills and the flatlands just beneath them. And a shot in the breakfast espresso—yielding a corretto, yelding or corrected coffee — got the motor started in the morning gloom.
Grappa is made by distilling debris left in the press after grapes have yielded up their precious juice. The debris is called pomace and consists of skins, seeds and dry pulp. A fiery, rustic, usually colorless alcohol, grappa (the name derives from the Italian word for grape stalk) has an oily, earthy taste with something of the barnyard about it, and a marked alcoholic kick.
Even at its best, grappa is not subtle. The French writer J. K. Huysmans said, with some justice, that if Cognac‘s music resembled a violin‘s and gin and whisky raised the roof of the mouth with the blare of their cornets and trombones, grappa‘s deafening din suggested the growl of the tuba.
But properly distilled and served cool (not cold), it has a beguilingly smoky taste, with hints of stone fruits like cherry and plum. Especially if made from the pomace of dessert wines, it can display a slight sweetness.
Grappa used to be made mostly by traveling distillers or by big industrial outfits like Stock, the Trieste brandy manufacturer. Too often it was a cheap, illmade product, an Italian version of white lightning.
Fancier Italians, and most foreigners, disdained it.
But that was before the Noninos of Percoto came to prominence. Here in their native town, a furniture-making center about 75 miles northeast of Venice and only 10 miles from the Slovenian border, they tamed grappa, taught it table manners and gave it mass appeal, not only in Italy but overseas, too.
The United States has become the second-largest export market, trailing only Germany. At Felidia in New York, Obelisk in Washington, Spiaggia in Chicago, Valentino in Los Angeles and dozens of other fine restaurants across the country, grappas are prominently displayed and eagerly consumed after dinner instead of Cognac or some other digestif. Tony May, the owner of San Domenico in Manhattan, said he had sold $50,000 worth this year, not to Italian visitors, but to Americans who come to Italian restaurants determined to laugh like Italians, eat like Italians and drink like Italians.
You might say, with a bit of poetic license, that grappa runs in Benito Nonino‘s veins. For several generations, stretching back into the 19th century, his family has been distilling in Friuli, the northeastern corner of Italy. A questing, hawk-nosed man, he and his handsome, extroverted wife, Giannola, longed, as he often says, to turn grappa from a Cinderella into a queen.
Together, the two of them did it. Instead of a single still, they installed a whole battery of discontinuous copper stills, which allowed them to interrupt the process in the middle of the run, when the spirit was at its peak, and discard the rest — a process known as topping and tailing. The pomace could thus be processed faster, while it was fresher, which muted the barnyard taste. While continuous stills are cheaper, they boil the pomace nonstop.
Unlike Cognac and Armagnac, which are made by distilling acidic wines few would care to drink, the best grappa is a byproduct of the best wines. The Noninos contracted for pomace from the stars of Friulian winemaking, including Mario Schiopetto, Josko Gravner, Livio Felluga and Gianfranco Gallo.
But raw ingredients and technique would not have been enough. The Noninos had another idea: instead of lumping all the pomace together, the residue of common grapes mixed with that from the more noble varieties, they would distill each separately, starting with picolit, a variety that produces a sweet, delicate dessert wine. The result was a delicious, highly perfumed grappa.
The Noninos made their first batch in 1973 and bottled it in individually blown flasks with silver-plated caps. The labels, handwritten by Giannola, a budding marketing genius, were tied onto the bottles with red yarn.
If the idea was to call attention to the product and to themselves, it worked. Others soon copied them, but the Noninos demonstrated a rare gift for selfpromotion. In their ads, they used a sunny family photograph of Benito, now 63, Giannola, 59, and their three stunning daughters — Cristina, 34, Antonella, 31, and Elisabetta, 29 — which soon became familiar all over Italy. They commissioned special bottles from great glassmakers like Baccarat, Riedel and Venini, and even established an annual literary prize. Most important, they worked tirelessly to insure that the best Italian restaurants stocked their products.
The picolit is still our best grappa, Mr. Nonino said with an eloquent shrug. I know it, the customers know it. I‘m satisfied. You can ask for one miracle in life and get it, but to ask for two is ridiculous.
Nardini, a big semi-industrial concern based in Bassano del Grappa, northwest of Venice, was the first to begin commercial production, in the 18th century. Now, more than 1,000 Italian vintners, including many of the very best, like Bruno Ceretto in Piedmont, Silvio Jermann in Friuli and Antonio Mastroberardino near Naples, either produce their own grappa or have a distiller produce it from their pomace and then send it to market under their own labels.
Although their products do not quite fill the mouth in the same way as the best of the Italian grappas do, American distillers like Clear Creek in Oregon and Germain-Robin in California have leaped aboard the grappa express, as have winemakers like Araujo in the Napa Valley. The French make a grappalike drink that they call marc, with special success in the Burgundy and Champagne regions, and the Spanish also produce a version of their own, called aguardiente.
But Nonino remains the marquee name, and this year, the Noninos will sell almost 1.3 million bottles of grappa. Giannola and Benito Nonino retain a remarkable zest for life and for work. One evening last fall, when my wife, Betsey, and I were visiting Percoto, he said his farewells after a long day at the office, jumped onto his bike and pedaled away, whistling Sentimental Journey.
With the exception of a few grappas that are aged in wood, giving them an amber hue, one looks just like another. So how do I distinguish my colorless liquid from yours? Like vodka distillers, grappa makers quickly found an answer in packaging. In addition to Nonino‘s flasks, you now find grappa in colored bottles and hand-painted bottles, in containers shaped like a bunch of grapes or a perfume flagon, even in bottles topped with miniature Alpine fedoras.
Some people think that things have got out of hand, like George Lang, the New York author and restaurateur, who remarked tartly not long ago, I‘m afraid that grappa-making has turned into glass blowing.
But it would be a mistake to conclude that clever packaging is always a ruse to conceal an inferior product. A case in point is Jacopo Poli, who makes grappas with finesse and packages them in elegant, long-necked bottles. I especially like his Amoroso di Torcolato, which has an appealing floral bouquet. Should you ever find yourself in Bassano, you can taste it at his little grappa museum, filled with portraits of Louis Pasteur and Leonardo da Vinci and Catherine de‘ Medici, shelves of ancient tomes on distilling technique and old alembics, or stills.
Distillation, daughter of alchemy, was born in remote antiquity, a placard announces gravely.
Bassano itself is a pretty, welcoming place, tucked beneath a pre-Alp called Monte Grappa. Some of the fiercest battles of World War I took place there, and it is now crowned with an ossuary holding the remains of 25,000 Italian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers. The neighborhood is dotted with Palladian villas, including Maser, where Veronese painted a delightful set of frescoes, and Palladio is also said to have designed the often-rebuilt covered wooden bridge that crosses the sparkling little River Brenta in the center of Bassano.
The Nardini company operates a smoky, atmospheric grappa bar at one end of the bridge, and one of the best artisan distillers in Italy, Vittorio Capovilla, a muscular man with an evangelical spirit, can be found at the end of a dusty lane just outside the village of Rosa, a half-hour‘s drive from Bassano. Armed with the latest in German technology, he makes not only grappa but also uva, which is distilled from the grapes themselves rather than from pomace, and which he considers much easier to digest. The seeds in the pomace used for grappa, he told me, contain essential oils that stun the gastric juices, causing trouble.
Mr. Capovilla‘s masterpieces, however, are distillates made from cultivated fruits like Gravenstein apples and Saturno pears, as well as rare wild fruits like sour mountain cherries and honey pears that he finds on his hikes in the hills. His products bear comparison to the best in Europe, but they are all but impossible to find; he has yet to master the ropes of commerce.
And then there is Romano Levi, the one and only, the living national treasure, the uncrowned king of Piedmontese distilling. A minute, Hobbitlike figure in a Greek sailor‘s cap, he works in a ramshackle old structure in the village of Neive, tending a Rube Goldberg assemblage of antique copper boilers and tubes. It is the size of a one-car garage, this world-famous grappa factory, and every bit as cluttered.
But it works. The grappa is superb, if a bit aggressive.
Mr. Levi is a recycler. To fire his still this year, he uses bricks pressed from the residue of last year‘s distillation. After they have burned, he returns the ashes to the wine producer who originally supplied the pomace, to use as fertilizer in the vineyard. He calls this the Piedmont life cycle.
He is also an inspired improviser. He offers visitors tastes of his products not by pouring them into glasses from bottles or from a pipette, but by lowering a medicine jar on a string through the bunghole into a Slovenian oak cask, hauling some grappa out and handing it over. You drink from the jar.
You have to go back to the Etruscans to find anything this rudimentary, said Burton Anderson, the wine writer, who was with us when we visited the operation. Black eyebrows arched, Mr. Levi professed not to understand how his gear operated; indeed, he told us, I know nothing at all about grappa.
Maybe not, but he has the soul of a poet and an artist. Asked how long he had been in business, he replied that he used only one match a year, to fire up his alembic when it was time to begin distilling, and had used 53 matches so far. He makes 6,000 to 10,000 liters a year, using pomace from Angelo Gaja and other Piedmontese winemakers, and he writes all the labels himself — in colored inks on torn pieces of paper, or directly on the bottles with paint.
I am currently working on a bottle produced in 1988, decorated with pictures of flame-red hibiscus flowers. The label specifies that the liquid inside is 48 percent alcohol, and as ever there is a line of enigmatic verse.
In a dream, it says, I dreamt.
December 1997
By R. W. Apple Jr. in " The New York Times Book of Wine", edited by Howard G. Goldberg, Sterling Epicure, New York, 2012, excerpts pp.101-104. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
Through uncounted decades, grappa was little more than a cheap, portable form of central heating for peasants in northern Italy.
A shot (or two, or three) after dinner helped ward off the damp, misty cold that often settles over the Alpine foothills and the flatlands just beneath them. And a shot in the breakfast espresso—yielding a corretto, yelding or corrected coffee — got the motor started in the morning gloom.
Grappa is made by distilling debris left in the press after grapes have yielded up their precious juice. The debris is called pomace and consists of skins, seeds and dry pulp. A fiery, rustic, usually colorless alcohol, grappa (the name derives from the Italian word for grape stalk) has an oily, earthy taste with something of the barnyard about it, and a marked alcoholic kick.
Even at its best, grappa is not subtle. The French writer J. K. Huysmans said, with some justice, that if Cognac‘s music resembled a violin‘s and gin and whisky raised the roof of the mouth with the blare of their cornets and trombones, grappa‘s deafening din suggested the growl of the tuba.
But properly distilled and served cool (not cold), it has a beguilingly smoky taste, with hints of stone fruits like cherry and plum. Especially if made from the pomace of dessert wines, it can display a slight sweetness.
Grappa used to be made mostly by traveling distillers or by big industrial outfits like Stock, the Trieste brandy manufacturer. Too often it was a cheap, illmade product, an Italian version of white lightning.
Fancier Italians, and most foreigners, disdained it.
But that was before the Noninos of Percoto came to prominence. Here in their native town, a furniture-making center about 75 miles northeast of Venice and only 10 miles from the Slovenian border, they tamed grappa, taught it table manners and gave it mass appeal, not only in Italy but overseas, too.
The United States has become the second-largest export market, trailing only Germany. At Felidia in New York, Obelisk in Washington, Spiaggia in Chicago, Valentino in Los Angeles and dozens of other fine restaurants across the country, grappas are prominently displayed and eagerly consumed after dinner instead of Cognac or some other digestif. Tony May, the owner of San Domenico in Manhattan, said he had sold $50,000 worth this year, not to Italian visitors, but to Americans who come to Italian restaurants determined to laugh like Italians, eat like Italians and drink like Italians.
You might say, with a bit of poetic license, that grappa runs in Benito Nonino‘s veins. For several generations, stretching back into the 19th century, his family has been distilling in Friuli, the northeastern corner of Italy. A questing, hawk-nosed man, he and his handsome, extroverted wife, Giannola, longed, as he often says, to turn grappa from a Cinderella into a queen.
Together, the two of them did it. Instead of a single still, they installed a whole battery of discontinuous copper stills, which allowed them to interrupt the process in the middle of the run, when the spirit was at its peak, and discard the rest — a process known as topping and tailing. The pomace could thus be processed faster, while it was fresher, which muted the barnyard taste. While continuous stills are cheaper, they boil the pomace nonstop.
Unlike Cognac and Armagnac, which are made by distilling acidic wines few would care to drink, the best grappa is a byproduct of the best wines. The Noninos contracted for pomace from the stars of Friulian winemaking, including Mario Schiopetto, Josko Gravner, Livio Felluga and Gianfranco Gallo.
But raw ingredients and technique would not have been enough. The Noninos had another idea: instead of lumping all the pomace together, the residue of common grapes mixed with that from the more noble varieties, they would distill each separately, starting with picolit, a variety that produces a sweet, delicate dessert wine. The result was a delicious, highly perfumed grappa.
The Noninos made their first batch in 1973 and bottled it in individually blown flasks with silver-plated caps. The labels, handwritten by Giannola, a budding marketing genius, were tied onto the bottles with red yarn.
If the idea was to call attention to the product and to themselves, it worked. Others soon copied them, but the Noninos demonstrated a rare gift for selfpromotion. In their ads, they used a sunny family photograph of Benito, now 63, Giannola, 59, and their three stunning daughters — Cristina, 34, Antonella, 31, and Elisabetta, 29 — which soon became familiar all over Italy. They commissioned special bottles from great glassmakers like Baccarat, Riedel and Venini, and even established an annual literary prize. Most important, they worked tirelessly to insure that the best Italian restaurants stocked their products.
The picolit is still our best grappa, Mr. Nonino said with an eloquent shrug. I know it, the customers know it. I‘m satisfied. You can ask for one miracle in life and get it, but to ask for two is ridiculous.
Nardini, a big semi-industrial concern based in Bassano del Grappa, northwest of Venice, was the first to begin commercial production, in the 18th century. Now, more than 1,000 Italian vintners, including many of the very best, like Bruno Ceretto in Piedmont, Silvio Jermann in Friuli and Antonio Mastroberardino near Naples, either produce their own grappa or have a distiller produce it from their pomace and then send it to market under their own labels.
Although their products do not quite fill the mouth in the same way as the best of the Italian grappas do, American distillers like Clear Creek in Oregon and Germain-Robin in California have leaped aboard the grappa express, as have winemakers like Araujo in the Napa Valley. The French make a grappalike drink that they call marc, with special success in the Burgundy and Champagne regions, and the Spanish also produce a version of their own, called aguardiente.
But Nonino remains the marquee name, and this year, the Noninos will sell almost 1.3 million bottles of grappa. Giannola and Benito Nonino retain a remarkable zest for life and for work. One evening last fall, when my wife, Betsey, and I were visiting Percoto, he said his farewells after a long day at the office, jumped onto his bike and pedaled away, whistling Sentimental Journey.
With the exception of a few grappas that are aged in wood, giving them an amber hue, one looks just like another. So how do I distinguish my colorless liquid from yours? Like vodka distillers, grappa makers quickly found an answer in packaging. In addition to Nonino‘s flasks, you now find grappa in colored bottles and hand-painted bottles, in containers shaped like a bunch of grapes or a perfume flagon, even in bottles topped with miniature Alpine fedoras.
Some people think that things have got out of hand, like George Lang, the New York author and restaurateur, who remarked tartly not long ago, I‘m afraid that grappa-making has turned into glass blowing.
But it would be a mistake to conclude that clever packaging is always a ruse to conceal an inferior product. A case in point is Jacopo Poli, who makes grappas with finesse and packages them in elegant, long-necked bottles. I especially like his Amoroso di Torcolato, which has an appealing floral bouquet. Should you ever find yourself in Bassano, you can taste it at his little grappa museum, filled with portraits of Louis Pasteur and Leonardo da Vinci and Catherine de‘ Medici, shelves of ancient tomes on distilling technique and old alembics, or stills.
Distillation, daughter of alchemy, was born in remote antiquity, a placard announces gravely.
Bassano itself is a pretty, welcoming place, tucked beneath a pre-Alp called Monte Grappa. Some of the fiercest battles of World War I took place there, and it is now crowned with an ossuary holding the remains of 25,000 Italian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers. The neighborhood is dotted with Palladian villas, including Maser, where Veronese painted a delightful set of frescoes, and Palladio is also said to have designed the often-rebuilt covered wooden bridge that crosses the sparkling little River Brenta in the center of Bassano.
The Nardini company operates a smoky, atmospheric grappa bar at one end of the bridge, and one of the best artisan distillers in Italy, Vittorio Capovilla, a muscular man with an evangelical spirit, can be found at the end of a dusty lane just outside the village of Rosa, a half-hour‘s drive from Bassano. Armed with the latest in German technology, he makes not only grappa but also uva, which is distilled from the grapes themselves rather than from pomace, and which he considers much easier to digest. The seeds in the pomace used for grappa, he told me, contain essential oils that stun the gastric juices, causing trouble.
Mr. Capovilla‘s masterpieces, however, are distillates made from cultivated fruits like Gravenstein apples and Saturno pears, as well as rare wild fruits like sour mountain cherries and honey pears that he finds on his hikes in the hills. His products bear comparison to the best in Europe, but they are all but impossible to find; he has yet to master the ropes of commerce.
And then there is Romano Levi, the one and only, the living national treasure, the uncrowned king of Piedmontese distilling. A minute, Hobbitlike figure in a Greek sailor‘s cap, he works in a ramshackle old structure in the village of Neive, tending a Rube Goldberg assemblage of antique copper boilers and tubes. It is the size of a one-car garage, this world-famous grappa factory, and every bit as cluttered.
But it works. The grappa is superb, if a bit aggressive.
Mr. Levi is a recycler. To fire his still this year, he uses bricks pressed from the residue of last year‘s distillation. After they have burned, he returns the ashes to the wine producer who originally supplied the pomace, to use as fertilizer in the vineyard. He calls this the Piedmont life cycle.
He is also an inspired improviser. He offers visitors tastes of his products not by pouring them into glasses from bottles or from a pipette, but by lowering a medicine jar on a string through the bunghole into a Slovenian oak cask, hauling some grappa out and handing it over. You drink from the jar.
You have to go back to the Etruscans to find anything this rudimentary, said Burton Anderson, the wine writer, who was with us when we visited the operation. Black eyebrows arched, Mr. Levi professed not to understand how his gear operated; indeed, he told us, I know nothing at all about grappa.
Maybe not, but he has the soul of a poet and an artist. Asked how long he had been in business, he replied that he used only one match a year, to fire up his alembic when it was time to begin distilling, and had used 53 matches so far. He makes 6,000 to 10,000 liters a year, using pomace from Angelo Gaja and other Piedmontese winemakers, and he writes all the labels himself — in colored inks on torn pieces of paper, or directly on the bottles with paint.
I am currently working on a bottle produced in 1988, decorated with pictures of flame-red hibiscus flowers. The label specifies that the liquid inside is 48 percent alcohol, and as ever there is a line of enigmatic verse.
In a dream, it says, I dreamt.
December 1997
By R. W. Apple Jr. in " The New York Times Book of Wine", edited by Howard G. Goldberg, Sterling Epicure, New York, 2012, excerpts pp.101-104. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.
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