Getting to grips with grappa

(PalatePress) - Earthy, rustic, fiery — grappa’s got a reputation as a real party animal, white lightning, Italian style. But did you know there are elegant, single-varietal grappas that can hold their own at the fanciest of soirées? Or grappa cocktails with a delicately floral touch?

Turns out, when it’s made with a devoted attention to detail, and quality, grappa can be quite the smooth operator.

As Giannola Nonino of the Nonino distillery puts it: “It’s a magical thing to transform the raw material, the skins of the grapes, into a crystalline distillate.’”

I met Giannola along with her husband Benito, and their three handsome daughters, Cristina, Antonella and Elisabetta, during a recent press trip to the Nonino distillery sponsored by Terlato Wines, the company’s U.S. distributor. The Noninos have a long history in grappa production; Benito’s family has been distilling in Italy’s Friuli region since 1897. (Giannola jokes, “I fell in love with my husband and then I fell in love with his job.”)

What makes the family story interesting is that the way they approach this traditional spirit, which is distilled from pomace, the skins and seeds left over after grapes have been crushed to make wine, and in the past has often been quite a rough brew, the kind of thing you use to keep the cold out.

The Nonino family challenged that paradigm 40 years ago when they started distilling grappa from just one grape variety — their first grappa was made from a Friulian white grape known as picolit — and using pomace from grapes grown specifically to make grappa, not the harvest leftovers.

Some growers took a while to accept the new approach. Elisabetta Nonino likes to tell the story of how, in an ingenious twist her mother enlisted the support of the grapegrowers’ wives by promising to pay the women a premium if they would make sure pomace was segregated by variety. The tactic worked beautifully; the Noninos got neat batches of pomace and the wives got a chance to make money of their own.