Boozehound by Jason Wilson

Author:Jason Wilson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9781580086110
Publisher: Ten Speed Press
Published: 2010-09-21T00:00:00+00:00

Since I was already drinking my way through Italy, I decided to veer northeast and head to up to the Veneto, to Bassano del Grappa, a charming city at the foothills of the Alps on the Brenta River. The town is grappa’s spiritual home, and I visited two distilleries there.

But wait. You’re also afraid of grappa, right? Maybe you once had a bad sip of the stuff after dinner in an Italian restaurant, or maybe, if you’re of Italian descent, you had a homemade snootful at an old relative’s house. Don’t worry, I’m not going tell you that my first experience with grappa was exquisite or transcendent. When I was an exchange student in Italy nearly twenty years ago, many of the men in the village where I lived enjoyed a daily caffè corretto, meaning they “corrected” their morning espressos with a shot of grappa. Those guys were always keen to pour me a little, too, and much of it was of the white-lightning variety and burned the esophagus like kerosene.

“Many people once had that same harsh, aggressive experience, and you’ll remember that experience your whole life,” says Jacopo Poli, fourth-generation distiller of one of Italy’s finest grappas, Poli. “But the grappas we are distilling now are at least ten times better than the grappa we drank twenty years ago.”

Grappa faces the same predicament that has plagued tequila. Most people’s early experiences with tequila were with poor-quality mixtos that left a mean hangover. Good, premium grappa, however, can be a lovely and complex spirit, just like premium tequila. Yet, as with tequila, it will be an uphill climb to convince people of that. That’s why grappa distillers in Italy went ballistic in 2008 when senators in the right-wing Lega Nord party proposed legalizing homemade grappa. “It’s nonsense,” Poli said. “It’s taken decades to get rid of the image of the clandestine still, of moonshine, of lowbrow grappa. And now they want to go back to the past?” So far, the legislation has not passed.

For a brief time, from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, grappa experienced a minor trendiness in the United States when Italian restaurants began offering a selection of grappas, many in showy, silly blown-glass bottles. But that small wave of popularity might have created an even larger long-term problem for premium grappa.

Around that time, some of Italy’s big-name winemakers, such as Antinori, Michele Chiarlo, Banfi, and others, jumped onto the grappa bandwagon, and a whole category of winery-branded grappas took off. A few are of decent quality, but many are not. Often they were created as a value add-on to restaurant wine orders (buy ten cases of our wine, and we’ll give you a free case of grappa) and also as brand reinforcement on their after-dinner menu; in other words, as a marketing gimmick.

“Just because the pomace came from a good winery doesn’t mean it’s going to make a good grappa,” Poli said. Grappa is not a brandy, as is often reported, and it’s not made with

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