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Look!
It's enchanting
It's the color of honey, of gold
It's right to say Picolit
A wonderful grape, look, look, look!
This is true Picolit. That I love.
I took the grafts
in the Perusini vineyard at Corno di Rosazzo.
Looking for the true one. Yes, the true one.
When they speak of
this typically Friulian vine, of this area,
It's a story I'd like to hand on
not only to my grandchildren,
but also to the people that aren't so lucky
to live in the country
and, living in town,
when you tell them of spargola grapes
noble mould and so on,
they tell you: what do these people eat?
And here we have the greatest witness.
Botrytis is a fungus.
This fungus has a well defined life cycle
and grows into many fruits
In grapes we have an action
that could be negative for some varieties,
but in passito wine, for example,
we look for the growth of noble botrytis
but how? Letting the grapes out of plant
and spreading inside the grape
it dehydrates it naturally
and so it increases the concentration of sugar
and of all the noble substances of the grape.
Forty years ago,
when I decided to make the first grappa
obtained from a single vine,
and everybody thought me crazy, really,
and to start from a vine like Picolit
that has a very limited production,
well, in non questionable times,
I started to come and look for Picolit grapes
in spring, in these vineyards
amid acacia trees, as you see there,
quince trees and so on,
I looked for the purest vineyards,
in the most suitable areas
and it was heady.
Since Veronelli said
that if you process the grapes of a single vine,
especially a cru, of a limited area,
on its own,
you will have particular perfumes and tastes.
why can't Benito,
who is a real master, the best distiller in the world,
manage to extract,
if I get him an exceptional primary product,
a kind of grappa
that reminds the perfume and taste of the ...
Of the original vine.
It was a bet, a test,
a distillation we dedicated to Veronelli,
it was a distillation I wanted to dedicate
to the women of Friuli,
who had helped me
to have the pomace of Picolit grapes on its own,
because their husbands said:
[Friulian Language]
"Never, madam,
I won't waste time to separate
Picolit pomace from other pomace."
If I give your husband
one thousand lire for 100 kg of mixed pomace,
I'll give you two hundred times more
the value of a kilo.
When I made the distillation
on December 1st 1973,
with Cristina, Antonella and Betty, my daughters,
we felt it was something special.
Benito made a distillation,
obviously with the presence of UTIF,
drop by drop
when I collected in my hand
the first drops of this nectar,
I perceived
the same perfume and softness
that comes from acacia honey and ripe quince
and that I found in the vineyards
where I went to choose the grapes,
I started to shout:
Benito, Benito, we've made it!
Obviously a very limited production,
we had obtained three demijohns,
what did we want?
We wanted to let the greatest number of consumers taste it
so that they realized
Nonino had done something matchless,
and to do this
we needed to have many glass bottles
and we decided to choose a small flask,
Benito chose it in a laboratory glass store,
which contained 250 ml of grappa,
and I must say this flask,
which reminds alchemy,
with handmade labels,
has remained intact, always the same.
What helped us
win this experimentation was:
the great excellence of the product obtained
and the consumer who,
approaching non rotgut grappa,
grappa that didn't help you bear the cold
as it was then considered,
but something elegant,
artisanally distilled grappa
could give a distillate
in no way inferior to other distillates.
Giannola, are you a manufacturer or an artisan?
I'm a grappa-maker, that's all.
But, I know you're a grappa-maker, but as ...
Not a manufacturer, absolutely,
because you know that manufacturers
are those who make grappa with the continuous equipment,
the continuous still,
certainly they don't select the vines,
don't take care of the pomace, of grappa,
they make a product that's always the same,
without big defects and great qualities,
which is good for them,
so never a manufacturer, absolutely!
Your still is the batch one,
manufacturers use the continuous type,
which is the difference?
The difference is this:
with a batch still
each batch is a distillation on its own,
because you know that each kind of pomace
has a particular characteristic,
so it depends on the distiller:
according to the kind of pomace he's distilling
he can decide if he wants to cut it earlier or later.
On the contrary with the continuous still
all the kinds of pomace are distilled in the same way,
no selections or cuts at the right moment are made.
They have an advantage, though,
they save labor and work much faster.
Let's distil
Picolit pomace
collected with late harvest
in order to have an unmatchable kind of grappa,
as always.
Let the stills open
and let out Grappa Cru Monovitigno Picolit 2013.
Hurray!
For decades grappa was little more than a pocket type of heating ...
Fancier Italians and most foreigners disdained it ...
But all this happened before the Noninos from Percoto came into prominence ...
OVER ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF DISTILLATION WITH ARTISANAL METHOD
We are waiting for you at Ronchi di Percoto in the distillery to discover together the mysterious world of distillation