Blog: Friuli-Venezia-Giulia | Wine region

The grapes from the Collio and nearby Isonzo areas yield high sugar levels, moderate acidity and convince with integrity and good balance. The wines from this area are more complex and better structured than those from the Grave del Friuli, which is the gravel plain west of Udine, towards Pordenone, towards the eastern Veneto. Due to higher complexity, the young wines need a little more time and attention in the cellar, as traditionally there is no large-scale use of technology. The new vintages are released after Easter at the earliest, usually not until Pentecost after the harvest, at which time longer bottle aging is indicated. Thus, these wines are rarely drunk quite young and most reveal their sophistication only from the second year. This sounds like anachronism in our fast-moving times, but it is an evolved and natural fact.

Pioneer Schiopetto
What Italians particularly appreciate in Friulian wine was originally created in the 1970s in the Collio Goriziano, for example, by Mario Schiopetto. His wines were then the purest revelations of freshness, fruit, liveliness, acidity and character. Schiopetto's triumph led many other winemakers to follow suit. In the meantime, the latest generation of winemakers, 25 years old, is at work. Building on the knowledge of the past 30 years, it has made recent and respectable progress in experience.

Friuli of the present
In Friuli, which has rightly been pampered by markets and wine popes in recent years, the real viticultural revolution is perhaps yet to come. Italy's easternmost wine-growing region, which wraps itself in a crescent shape around the gold of Trieste, reflects like no other the contradiction between centuries-old traditions of viticulture and the history of quality wine-growing that dates back only a few decades.

The region, whose vineyards - with the exception of the Gorizia area - were historically planted mainly with red varieties - for as late as the 1960s, almost half of the production was Merlot - has acquired in a few years a solid reputation as a supplier of high quality white wines that have found their lovers in Italy, but also abroad.

The region's winemakers began to turn their attention to the identity of their own wines, focusing more on terroir-based white blends, and again, as in the old days, on the red varieties, which this time, however, no longer come across as thin, drinkable everyday wines, but as dense and structurally accentuated grapes.

Merlot in particular, once the region's cellar child, has reached a level that is causing a stir with the products of Livio Felluga, Villa Russiz and others. The real sensation, however, is the autochthonous grape varieties such as Schioppettino, Refosco and Pignolo, which in some wineries are at such a spectacular level that they should be an excellent starting point for the post-international era. - Gerardo [TS03/23]