Philosophy
A few years ago it seemed like a good idea to create a rather sui generis "negociant" business to give my experimental ambitions an appropriate outlet whilst unmasking the integrist approach of those who see the "grape and wine business" as a purely commercial undertaking.
To this end I started making wines together with various wine producing friends who generously gave me the physical and psychological space to come up with wines in their cellars that went beyond their normal production.
From here to the first results in Buttrio next to my friend Enzo Pontoni, a phenomenal wine producer and uncompromising man who let me loose on some Tocai Friulano and Sauvignon that didn't quite fit the severe blending process of his own wines. Excellent wines nonetheless, but wines that didn't quite fit the crystaline purity of the wines released under the Miani label.
In the same period another respected Friulian cellar, Le Due Terre in Prepotto, gave me ample space to experiment with their young merlot grapes, vinified along classical lines without useless oenological intervention. An authentic school that enriched me with crucial information for my future explorations, and that for some inexplicable reason irritated the tasters of the specialist guidebooks who felt excluded from what was an inoffensive experiment.
Every wine represents a solution, an experience allowing me to understand and produce something enjoyable, whilst enabling the producers to make good use of grapes that don't yet have an obvious place in their brands' ranges.
A fundamental meeting along the way, both professionally and personally, was with Serena Palazzolo, the uncompromising force behind Ronco del Gnemiz: Here Necotium's wines have also found a stable home that has enabled their subsequent development, with trials like the Schioppettino vinified like a Pinot Noir and a few good bottles of Malvasia Istriana that I'm still wondering what to do with - I'm not completely sure that I've found the right interpretation yet.
After years of extravagant poetry, the moment inevitably came to build an economic structure that would support the more extreme experiments. To this end I've found nothing better than the wine the whole world (except true Friulians) drinks: Pinot Grigio, a product that makes us about as much as the coffee producers in Brasil or India, and while dedicating an authentic tradition and lifestyle to the precious berries, they don't drink coffee at all. Similarly with our Pinot Grigio that enthralls producers and salesmen, despite the miserable price it's sold for, but is never chosen by the customer of the Friulian restaurant who won't renounce his "Tocai" - at best he'll accept a glass of aromatic Sauvignon.
But even producing a commercial Pinot Grigio I've tried to make the purest, most pleasant version possible, mixing grapes from the plains and their adjacent hills, with good acidity and without the residual sugar that "infects" the products of our region and the tastes of the stars and stripes that's invading the kingdom of good wine...
Thanks to this range of everyday wines that includes a few bottles of fruity rosé saignée from some of the regions best grapes, I've been able to take a more agricultural path. Of two projects underway, one, the Tenute della Contessa is already bottled, the other I'll talk about once the liquid is ready.
The Tenute della Contessa is in Cormons, home of the grape that for me will always be called Tocai, but that legal eagles, politicians and cowering, blinded producers insist on calling Friulano. Ten thousand bottles from nearly three hectares of a wine conceived to express the poetry of simplicity and that celebrates a historical moment in Friulian oenology when Mario Schiopetto decided that our wines should be clean, rich and fresh. The project is explained in more detail on its own page.
The true culprit of all this activity is that I have never had enough money to buy my own estate, and I probably never will. Instead I have had to cede to the industrialists and the powerful who keep adding extraordinary terroirs to their estates without knowing what to do with them, paying unheard-of quantities for land ensuring no small grape producers will ever be able to expand their holdings.
As a result I'm split between rented vineyards and purchased grapes to be able to bottles these ideas that are fundamentally simple, moderately ambitious and very, very clear.
Christian Patat.