Friuli-Venezia Giulia

Friuli changed Italian white wine twice. In the 1960s and 70s its producers worked out how to make clean, cool-fermented, varietally precise whites when most of Italy could not, and the rest of the country followed. Then, a generation later, a handful of growers a few kilometres away threw all of that out and started fermenting whites on their skins in buried amphorae. Both revolutions happened on the same hills.

The Landscape The region sits in Italy’s north-eastern corner against Austria and Slovenia, and was assembled in its present shape in 1947 out of Venetian Friuli and part of Eastern Friuli. The Julian and Carnic Alps take up 43 per cent of the territory and grow nothing; the vineyards are in the plain and on the hills east of Udine. Seventy per cent of the planted area is flat and only 30 per cent is hillside, but that 30 per cent is where almost everything worth discussing is made.

Ponca The key soil is flysch — alternating marl and sandstone laid down in a deep marine basin — which locals in the Collio call ponca. It weathers quickly into a thin, poor, well-drained topsoil that vines root into readily, and it is the single best explanation for the texture and mineral bite of the wines. The Collio’s hills reach only about 270 metres, sheltered to the north by the Julian Pre-Alps and open to the south to the sea. The Colli Orientali alternate marls, calcareous clays, sandstones and calcified sands, cooler and wetter towards the mountains, milder and drier to the south. The Grave, the region’s largest zone, lies between Pordenone, San Daniele, Udine and Palmanova on ancient stony riverbeds that drain freely. And towards Trieste the ground turns to Cretaceous limestone plateau, the Karst, where vines grow only in the sinkholes among the iron-red terra rossa.

Rome Took It Seriously Wine is documented here from 181 BC, the year Aquileia was founded. Livy records that the Roman Senate expressly decreed that viticulture be expanded in Friuli because the land suited it and the returns were good — a rare instance of an ancient state making a deliberate wine policy. Strabo wrote about Aquileia and Cividale, the Forum Iulii that gave Friuli its name, as major trading posts in the north of the Empire, and Herodian described the countryside around Aquileia with its trees set at equal distances and vines coupled between them, so that the land seemed adorned.

The Grapes Friulano is the regional white, broad and faintly bitter with a nutty finish. Ribolla Gialla is the other, leaner and more citric, and the grape most associated with skin contact in Oslavia. Malvasia Istriana, Verduzzo and the rare, difficult Picolit fill out the whites. The reds are seriously underrated: Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso, dark and sour-cherried; Schioppettino, peppery and perfumed; Pignolo, tannic and slow; and Tazzelenghe, whose name means tongue-cutter and is not an exaggeration. In the Grave, though, the most planted variety is Merlot, followed by Pinot, Chardonnay and Cabernet Franc — international grapes that have been here long enough to have stopped being foreign.

The Critical Take Friuli makes the most technically accomplished white wines in Italy and has arguably been too good at it: a great deal of correct, clean, expensive Pinot Grigio and Sauvignon leaves the region every year without saying anything about where it came from. The wines that matter are the ones that could come from nowhere else — Collio Friulano off ponca, Ribolla Gialla, and the four native reds. The orange-wine movement that started in Oslavia has been enormously influential and is genuinely worth engaging with, though it produces as much faulty wine as visionary wine, and the difference is not always acknowledged by its admirers. Picolit, meanwhile, trades on scarcity more than quality.

At the Table Prosciutto di San Daniele, frico of melted Montasio and potato, cjarsons stuffed with herbs and sweet spices, brovada of turnips fermented in grape must, and gubana for dessert. Friulano with San Daniele is the regional reflex and hard to improve on.

Where to Start A Collio Friulano from a hillside producer, then a Refosco, then one skin-contact Ribolla Gialla — in that order, so the third makes sense against the first two.