December 17, 2019

The Nonino Prize Forty-fifth year starts again from San Francisco with an international vision!

The Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco will host the twentieth edition of the prestigious Wine Enthusiast Wine Star Awards, the most important international prize in the world of wine and spirits. To make this ceremony special for Italy there will be the presence of the Nonino Distillery from Percoto, the first Italian company to be awarded the section “Spirit Brand / Distiller of the Year 2019”.
The Nonino family will arrive in San Francisco with their company history, together with the President of the Nonino Prize Jury, the scientist Professor Antonio Damasio.
The Californian ceremony will take place at the end of January and the date will coincide with the awarding of the Nonino Prize, an event that has always been held in Friuli on the last Saturday of January with the presence of the whole family. For this reason, the Nonino Prize Forty-fifth year will be awarded on 30th January 2021, with the presence of the Jury presided by Antonio Damasio and composed by Adonis, John Banville, Ulderico Bernardi, Peter Brook, Luca Cendali, Le Roy Ladurie, James Lovelock, Claudio Magris, Norman Manea and Edgar Morin.
The cultural heritage of the Nonino Prize, built in all these years with great passion, will become more and more the heritage of all, inaugurating, moreover, a series of international meetings with the Jurors and the present and past Prizewinners, involving also the new generations in the cultural and environmental battles for which the Nonino Prize was born.
With the Nonino family, on the stage of the iconic Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, among the other prizewinners, there will be the director Francis Ford Coppola (“Lifetime Achievement Award” for his career) and the musician Jon Bon Giovi (“Wine and Culture Award”).
Selecting the best of the world production, the one that “attracts the attention of the operators and the press from all continents”, from a shortlist of five finalists, including the prestigious brands Banks Rum Bacardi Group, Remy Martin, Charbay Distillery, and Legent, the Nonino Distillery was proclaimed the winner!
It is the consecration of a challenge that began on December 1, 1973, when Benito and Giannola, convinced of the great potential of their grappa, decided to focus their commitment to absolute
excellence, revolutionizing the common concept among consumers and changing the image of a traditional product, until then considered “poor”, almost a means to heat the farmers during the cold winters of Northern Italy. It was thanks to the Nonino couple, in fact, that grappa reached the quality and the prestige of the best foreign distillates which, until then, it had not been acknowledged by Italian and foreign consumers. From Cinderella to a Queen in the Olympus of the great spirits in the world!
The motivation for the Award “Spirit Brand / Distiller of the Year 2019” attributes to the Nonino family “energy, courage, and a revolutionary vision”, emphasizing their ability to “redesign a traditional distillate for the modern era”, “their continuous commitment to excellence” based on the search for innovation, while respecting the culture and identity of the territory. It is for these merits, the jurors say, that Nonino grappa, which has been present on international markets for over forty years, represents an expression of the Best of the made in Italy.
The success of this challenge has already been witnessed by Wine Spectator which, in December 2000 chose Grappa Cru Monovitigno® Picolit at the opening, among all the distillates in the world; by the Saturday Profile of the New York Times in 2003; and in January 2017 by the London School of Economics Business Review, with the publication “How to turn a product from Cinderella into a queen of the market”. At that time the prestigious magazine wrote: “Giannola and her family, thanks to their Picolit Grappa, created a bridgehead in the expensive high-status category occupied by foreign distillates; other producers followed and, over time, overturned the entire meaning of grappa in the Italian society. Grappa became ‘the national spirit’, on the same level of whisky and cognac”, and later led to the creation of extraordinary new products such as Amaro Nonino Quintessentia® and L’Aperitivo Nonino BotanicalDrink®.
PRIZE MOTIVATION – Spirit Brand / Distiller of the Year – NONINO
Known for its high-quality, Monovitigno® Grappas introduced in the 1970s, the six-generation Nonino family distillery based in Friuli has begun to shake up the spirits world with its bittersweet, herb-scented Amaro Nonino Quintessentia® in recent years.
It has excited a new generation of mixologists and cocktail drinkers, along with those who sip it straight or over ice as a traditional digestive.
Today, Nonino is run by the three daughters of Benito & Giannola Nonino, who have recently introduced L’Aperitivo Nonino, a fresh and fruity grape-based drink that’s infused with dried botanicals.