My Grappa Heaven

 To just north of Venice at the weekend to go to a wine tasting at Smooth Tony's. On the way Bruno and I stopped off here, at Nardini's Distillery Tap in the historic town of Bassano del Grappa, so you get the idea of this town's principal business. The firm is still family owned and run of course, no stock market quotation or selling out for lots of wonga to some French luxury goods conglomerate here, this is Italy not Blighty after all. All the bottles in the bar are of different types of grappa and they don't sell anything else.

 It was packed at four in the afternoon, with people enjoying a range of different grappa-based snifters.

   

This is the view from one side of the bar of the historic bridge, that's if you can still have the power of vision of course.

And this is the view from the other side. Not bad eh?

Bruno and I started with some serious 50º grappas and then moved on to their Tagliatella which is a grappa-based liqueur and difficult to find outside of the Veneto region. Then we saw some people knocking these back so we had one each.

They're called cinquanta-cinquanta (50/50) and we never found out what the make-up was as we seemed to have mislaid the power of speech. But long live Nardini and Italian tradition!

A Grappa Frenzy

The arrival of The Intrepid One meant that vaulting off the wagon two days early was forgiveable I think. Saturday evening came and went in a wonderful haze of decent local wines of both colours and some serious nosh (rabbit since you ask preceded by Combo own label mushrooms and stuffed chilli peppers). On Sunday TIO tootled off but there was no stopping Ronnie and lunch at a local restaurant seemed in order. To mark the occasion and to help the digestion (of course), the owner pulled this one off the special shelf, age unknown but at least 40 years old as the company stopped making grappa in 1960.
It was surprisingly mellow with a pleasant aviation fuel afterburn.

Then it was on to Bruno's where he pulled these two babies out, from profoundly different ends of the grappa spectrum.
The Tagliatella is from my favourite grappa house, Nardini, and is a terribly moreish grappa - amaro cross. The other bottle needs to be drunk wearing the sort of kit bomb-disposal experts don before they approach some roadside device in Afghanistan. Not for the faint-hearted.