Schiopetto Friulano: 1992-2017

BY IAN D'AGATA | MARCH 03, 2020

Mario Schiopetto is considered the father of modern Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG) wines. Before his arrival, FVG wines garnered mostly local interest and were consumed fairly quickly after the harvest. But Schiopetto’s wines were clean, precise, mineral and ageworthy, and they rapidly gained an international following, literally putting FVG on the map. Schiopetto’s Friulano, first made in 1965, has long been one of the region’s gold standards for this iconic indigenous variety.

Born in 1930, Mario Schiopetto took an atypical path to stardom, holding a number of different jobs before becoming a full-time wine producer. When still young, he worked in his family’s restaurant in Udine, the Osteria ai Pompieri, where he learned about wine from his father, Giorgio. Schiopetto was also a truck driver, and spent considerable amounts of time in Germany and France. Though these two jobs were far removed from the more common path of attending viticulture and enology school (the route most winemakers and producers follow today), they did allow Schiopetto to gain hands-on experience with European wines. At the restaurant, he was able to try all the better-known Italian wines of the time, many of which did not leave him especially impressed, while his travels through Europe helped him develop his palate for great German Riesling and French Chardonnay. In his formative years, Schiopetto learned a great deal about terroir and grapevines from the French, but there is no doubt that German winemaking most influenced his vision of the wines he wanted to create. Schiopetto’s whites were and always have been famous for their purity, precision, cut and minimal oak; in fact, while Schiopetto made his first Tocai (known as Friulano today) in 1965, he did not employ any oak barrels whatsoever until the 1980s. Even then, he used large old oak barrels and only for a short period of time.

Schiopetto was not just innovative in his winemaking, but also blessed with keen marketing and business acumen. At a time when few, if any, FVG wineries were known outside of the region and producers sold their wine in bulk or in demijohns, Schiopetto was the first to estate-bottle under his own label. He was also extremely careful about selling his wine to specific niche markets, wanting to place it in upscale shops where FVG wine had not been sold much before. In the 1990s Schiopetto built a new cellar in Capriva del Friuli and bought the estate’s first vineyards, located outside of the Collio, near Rosazzo, in FVG’s Colli Orientali denomination.

After Schiopetto’s death in 2003 at 72 years of age, his children Maria Angela, Carlo and Giorgio took over, prior to selling the estate to current owner Emilio Rotolo in 2014. (Rotolo is also the owner of the prestigious FVG Volpe Pasini estate.) When he took over, Rotolo installed Maria Angela as honorary president to maintain a link with the Schiopetto name and history. Today it is Alessandro Rotolo, one of Emilio Rotolo’s two sons, who follows Schiopetto most closely, helped by consultant winemaker Lorenzo Landi.