Nonino’s chestnut-honey distillate was featured in this week’s New York Times: in his article, “Going the Distance to Make Craft Cocktails at Home,” writer Jeff Gordinier recreates cocktails from celebrity mixologist Jim Meehan’s new book, The PDT Cocktail Book: the Complete Bartender’s Guide from the Celebrated Speakeasy (Sterling, November, 2011).
Category Archives: distillates
Nonino Gioiello chestnut-honey distillate featured in NY Times
Filed under cocktails, distillates
Lunch at home with the Nonino family
In January 2011, my wife Tracie P and I were guests in the home of the Nonino family. Our delicious and fascinating meal lasted 3 hours! Here’s my post on our visit.
Conversation over lunch in the home of the Nonino family (the first family of Italian distillation) ranged from encounters with Marcello Mastroianni, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Luigi Veronelli to the (literal) renaissance of native grape varieties in Friuli. I was THRILLED to be invited for lunch in their home, a fascinating family with a fascinating history. That’s daughter Cristina and father Benito above. They served an aperitif of Amaro Nonino on the rocks with a slice of blood orange.
Filed under distillates, family, Friuli, history, people
The legendary R.W. Apple on Nonino
Legendary food and wine writer R.W. Apple’s landmark New York Times article on Grappa changed the way Americans saw (and tasted) Italian distillates in 1997.
“Grappa, Fiery Friend of Peasants, Now Glows With a Quieter Flame”
By R.W. Apple, New York Times, December 31, 1997
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.”
Filed under distillates, Friuli, New York, people
