Article by Matteo Donelli

Distillers in Friuli since 1897. With peasant heart, spirit and tenacity.

Italian family with Italian rural family dynamics.

Concreteness.

Tough and rough. Rough in not compromising with unbridled marketing and often real subversives of the trends of large productions.

The Nonino family has been able to transform Grappa, for centuries considered a poor distillate, born from the waste of winemaking, into an elitist and cultural product, becoming in 2019 the first Italian distillery and the first brand of grappa to be elected "Best Distillery in the World "By Wine Enthusiast.

Nonino grappa

A life of work and passion for distillation, which led them to make three great revolutions in the world of distillation:

1. On 1 December 1973 they revolutionized the way of producing and proposing grappa in the world by creating the first single-variety grappa, Monovitigno® Nonino.

2. November 27, 1984 marked a new turning point: they were the first to distill whole grapes and created the Grape Distillate ÙE® Picolit.

3. In 2000, after years of research, they presented GIOIELLO®, the distillate of 'Purity', the brandy of pure honey

Grappa Nonino stills

For the Nonino family, distillation is a business to be shared daily with a single partner, a majority shareholder to be respected and venerated daily: nature.

They immediately adopt a productive diktat that leaves no room for "commercial shortcuts". The very structure of their distillery is a true declaration of love for the marc, their precious raw material.

The marc is the part of the grape richest in polyphenols and aromatic substances but it is very delicate, it only takes a few hours for it to begin to develop secondary degenerative fermentations. To respect the freshness of their raw material, the Noninos have gone against the industry's habit of storing and distilling it for 8 months a year, choosing to distil exclusively in conjunction with the harvest. For this they have built a distillery with 66 artisanal discontinuous stills (against the average of 6-12 stills of Italian distilleries) which distill 7 days a week, 7 hours a day, but only for 24 weeks a year.

The real Nonino revolution is precisely this, to love your work so much that you are willing to put respect for the quality of the raw material they distill at the center of your life, day after day, harvest after harvest. They have thus imposed new qualitative peculiarities on the grappa market, raising the status of the entire category.

A hedonistic must of the Italian after-dinner tasting on a par with the great foreign spirits such as whiskey and cognac.

nonino family

How they arrived at the result of such great prestige was really a university study path.

Suffice it to say that in their life as distillers, they also created a Literary Prize. Born in 1975 to save the autochthonous Friulian vines whose cultivation had become illegal (Pignolo, Schioppettino, Tazzelenghe and Ribolla Gialla), the Nonino Prize has then become an international prize over the years which preceded the Nobel Prize 6 times. A crucial cultural commitment where grappa elegantly joined international debates on crucial issues.

And all this was thanks to the passion for their work. In Ronchi di Percoto, a few kilometers from Udine, Nonino is today a consolidated reality with 40 employees and an increase in turnover of almost 13 million euros.

The incredible and complex rise of Nonino in the Olympus of world distillates starts from passion: a family of distillers for 124 years in love with the art of distillation.

Nonino: the family that revolutionized the world of Grappa last edit: 2021-10-27T14:03:01+02:00 da Matthew Donelli

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