Poli, Jacopo (1963–), is one of a handful of northern Italian (often Venetian) distillers who have helped to elevate grappa from a rustic and fiery distillate consumed only locally to a highly respected and noble spirit celebrated on the world stage. Poli himself does not claim quite as much, pointing to his predecessors, familial, collegial, and historical. He references Bartolomeo Baglioni’s early nineteenth-century invention of a stripping column, as well as Enrico Comboni’s creation of steam distillation a few decades later and Tullio Zadra’s refinement of the bagnomaria (bain-marie, or double boiler) in the 1950s and 1960s. See still, continuous. Poli’s great-grandfather GioBatta Poli (1846–1921) crafted his first still in 1898, in an era when continuous steam distillation had become efficient enough to strip grappa of most character. Subsequent stills at the Poli distillery moved beyond steam copper cauldrons to bain-marie boilers, one of which is a vacuum still installed by Jacopo in 1983.
In the 1970s, Nonino created the first monovitigno (single-variety grappa), and Poli and others followed, crafting grappe that were shockingly clean and expressed a purer expression of their source fruit, and began selling their grappe with varietal designations in elaborate and expensive bottles, sometimes hand-blown. Exclusivity helped deliver a message of higher quality and was doubtless a factor in the growth of quality grappa and its often lofty prices. Poli’s distillery and home in Schiavon in Veneto is directly across from the Grappa Museum; Poli opened the Poli Grappa Museum in nearby Bassano del Grappa in 2011.
Behrendt, Axel, and Bibiana Behrendt. Grappa: A Guide to the Best. New York: Abbeville, 2000.
Boudin, Ove. Grappa: Italy Bottled. San Francisco: Wine Appreciation, 2008.
Poli, Jacopo. Grappa: Italian Spirit. New York: Rizzoli, 2014.
By: Doug Frost