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13.02.2004 |
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Face-Lift for Top Producer of Italian Whites |
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Posted: Tuesday, February 10, 2004
By Jo Cooke
The Schiopetto winery in Friuli, one of Italy's most prestigious white wine producers, has recently completed a three-year project to reduce its portfolio of wines and to present the wines in different bottles with new labels.
Schiopetto has cut its overall portfolio almost by half, from 17 wines down to eight. The winery exports only its whites to the United States, so American consumers soon will find only six Schiopetto wines from the 2002 vintage, compared with eight from 2001.
Gone are the separate bottlings of Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc from the Podere dei Blumeri estate in the Colli Orientali del Friuli zone. (The family's main estate is in the Collio DOC.) Gone also are the distinctive longneck bottles that Schiopetto introduced to the region in the 1980s. All the estate's wines are now packaged in regular Bordelais-style bottles, with new classic-looking white labels with a royal-blue border.
Schiopetto now offers four single-varietal whites: Pinot Bianco, Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc and Tocai Friulano. It also produces two white blends. One, Blanc des Rosis, is made from Tocai Friulano, Pinot Bianco, Malvasia Istriana and Sauvignon Blanc. The other is a new Chardonnay/Tocai Friulano blend, which was launched with the 2002 vintage. It is called "Mario Schiopetto" in tribute to the late founder of the family estate, whose pioneering work with local white varieties, starting in the mid-1960s, was largely responsible for placing the region of Friuli on the world wine map.
Schiopetto continued to run the family estate until April 2003, when he died after a long battle with cancer. His children, Maria Angela, Giorgio and Carlo, now oversee the estate.
Maria Angela said the reevaluation of the estate was set in motion by her father, back in 2000, with the idea of simplifying the portfolio for consumers. "The fact that we produced two versions of our single-variety whites [one from the Collio DOC estate and one from Podere dei Blumeri] was confusing the market," she said.
However, that change soon turned into a complete rethinking of the Schiopetto line, including the packaging. "We liked the tall bottles," Maria Angela said, "but our clients were finding them hard to manage. So we took advantage of the other changes going on to change the bottles as well."
www.schiopetto.it
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