Volpe Pasini Pinot Bianco Zuc di Volpe: 1999-2017

BY IAN D'AGATA | FEBRUARY 11, 2020

Volpe Pasini is one of Italy’s oldest wine estates, with records demonstrating the existence of a Volpe estate in 1596. The second half of the current name, Pasini, was added later, at the end of World War II, when there were no more Volpe heirs and the Pasini side of the family took over. Volpe Pasini has always had an excellent reputation – apparently, it was the first winery to sell bottled Friuli Venezia Giulia (FVG) wines in the USA – but the modern history of the estate really began only in the mid-1960s with Giampaolo Volpe Pasini, who, like many other Friuli winemakers of that generation, learned much of what he knew about wine from Mario Schiopetto, the father of modern FVG wines.

Today the estate is owned by Emilio Rotolo, a former gastroenterologist originally from Calabria. In 1995, Rotolo was looking for a country home where he could relax and devote himself to reading. Upon seeing the Volpe Pasini estate, he was immediately smitten with the beautiful Villa Rosa, a late-16th-century building blessed with an amazing library. But as Rotolo likes to joke, “the real problem was that the villa also had a very good cellar, and I was ruined! Bitten by the wine bug, I started making wine. And so, instead of resting, I have never worked as hard as I have in these 25 years of winemaking. Just imagine that there are seven to eight thousand books in the library that I wanted to read, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t been able to read one book!” Rotolo has a deadpan sense of humor, but his love for wine and its lifestyle runs deep; after all, it can’t be quite as bad as he makes it out to be, given that in 2014 he bought himself another important winery (FVG’s famous Schiopetto estate). Of the many very successful, noteworthy wines the estate has been associated with (for example, Volpe Pasini once owned some of the region’s oldest and best Picolit vines, unfortunately uprooted back in the late 1980s), it is their Pinot Bianco that most distinguishes the winery, given the estate’s long association with this specific variety. In fact, the 1933 Pinot Bianco, then labeled as Pinot Bianco Zucco, holds the distinction of being, at least as far as I can tell, the first Italian estate-bottled Pinot Bianco wine.

The beautiful Volpe Pasini villa