In Memory of Leonildo Pieropan

BY IAN D'AGATA | APRIL 14, 2018

Simply put, there have been fewer
better, nicer, more knowledgeable and more important people in the world of
Italian wine than Leonildo (Nino) Pieropan. Words are truly incapable of expressing
who Pieropan was and what he stood for: a beacon of world-class wines back in
the 1970s when Italy’s white wines were mostly an afterthought, an absolute
innovator, an intelligently critical voice of Soave’s coop-dominated world, a
first-rate Amarone producer and, last but not least, one of the founding members
of the all-important Federazione Italiana Vignaioli
Indipendenti (or FIVI). Although Pieropan’s health had not been good for some
time, the news of his passing came as an absolute shock to most everyone.

I
was in my teens when, thanks to my dad, I tasted my first great Italian wine.
It was Pieropan’s 1971 Soave Calvarino. No Italian white wine I had ever tasted
up to that point was remotely close to the quality of that wine. I still
remember every drop. The fourth time I drank a truly great white wine from
Italy was a couple of years later, which tells you just how hard it was to come
by great Italian white wines. This time it was Pieropan’s 1979 Soave Calvarino.
That may help put things into perspective. Pieropan has accompanied my life in
wine, and he has done so with grace and style. <img alt="" src="https://allgrapes.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads%2F1523737499206-Pieropan.jpg"> 

I first
met Leonildo Pieropan in the mid to late 1980s in Rome. That encounter was
enough to make me drive up to Soave and visit him at the estate. I cherish that
walk in the vineyards as one of the most memorable moments of my life. In a
couple of hours with Nino, I learned more than I have listening to other people
for days. Nino had an encyclopedic knowledge about Soave, its history, its
viticulture and its wines, and was always generous in sharing his time,
anecdotes and information with all who visited the winery.

Pieropan’s
grandfather, also named Leonildo, founded the estate in 1880 and was the first
to bottle a wine labeled “Soave” in 1932, even though the Soave DOC was
established only in 1968. But it was Nino, who graduated in 1966 from the famous oenological school
in Conegliano, who took
Pieropan to the highest echelons of wine relevance. He was the first to bottle a
single-vineyard Soave, the 1971 Calvarino of my memories, from a vineyard owned
by the family since 1901. In 1978, Pieropan released a second vineyard
designate wine, from the family’s La Rocca vineyard. Both remain among Italy’s
twenty-five or so best whites.

Leonildo Pieropan died on 13
April 2018, aged 71. Pieropan will be missed by everyone who cares about quality
wines, and the people who make them. The two are not as common as we’d all like
to think they are. Nino’s wife Teresita and his two children, Andrea and Dario,
will no doubt ensure that Nino’s legacy lives on in the gentlemanly style he
was known and admired for. All of us at Vinous would like to extend our
condolences to the Pieropan family.

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