Friuli-Venezia Giulia in 7 Wines
Friuli-Venezia Giulia in 7 Wines
Finds from the northeastern Italian region at the forefront of orange and natural winemaking.
During Ein Prosit, a culinary festival in Italy’s Friuli-Venezia Giulia region in the northeastern corner of the country, more than 100 high chefs from all over the world, nearly all of them with restaurants that have Michelin stars or are on the World’s 50 Best list, cooked collaborative dinners that were set in a dozen or so restaurants in or around the city of Udine on any single night over a five-day period. As far as I can tell, it is the largest gathering of international chefs that are actually cooking anywhere in the world. The dinners, a dozen or so each were mostly multi-course, hours long affairs with drink pairings, nearly all sold out primarily to local and regional Italian guests. Each night ended with an after party featuring select bartenders from around the world, and each day began with a series of workshops and lectures. The one constant throughout the event was wines from the surrounding Friuli-Venezia Giulia region.
The success of Ein Prosit is directly tied to the quality of wines from Friuli, which were my primary motivation for going. The region is best known for white wines with lots of acidity, and spicy reds. There are some of Italy’s largest industrial grape growers here, but it’s also a region that has helped lay the foundations for the modern wine movement. It was here in 1995, that the winemaker Stanko Radikon began pushing for a purer expression of the landscape, peeling back layers of preconceptions that had become standard in winemaking. He refined a technique of his grandfather of long macerations of white wine grapes with their skin, giving the wine more flavor and an orange to amber color. Over time he stopped adding sulfur, fermenting with only natural yeasts, traded stainless steel and French Oak for wooden vats. Around the same time, in the year 2000, Josko Gravner introduced amphora to the region from Georgia, popularizing the clay fermentation vessels around the world (called qvevri Georgia, they never stopped being used there).
Today, the region is home to dozens of interesting winemakers, and I was introduced to many I hadn’t heard of before on this trip. White wines dominate, though there’s plenty of orange and a smattering of reds that caught my interest.
Nikolas Grande Waldo Vino Bianco 2021
Straight from landing in Venice I went to Hisa Franko, just over the border from Friuli in Slovenia. Since I spent a week with Ana Roš in Chile during the Gelinaz! Shuffle in 2015 I have tried to come here any chance I get. It was recently awarded its third Michelin star, though I found the atmosphere refreshingly the same as it always has been. The pairing has always been one of my favorite ways to seek out new wines from both Friuli and Italy, as they have close relationships with a lot of the producers and a lot of the vineyards straddle the border, especially in the south of Friuli around Gorizia (note that there is also an incredible non-alcoholic pairing with kombuchas and waters of local fruits, herbs and essences). There were bottles of Gravner and Slovenian producer Organic Anarchy, but I also had my first taste of wine from Nikolas Juretic, who is gaining a lot of recognition in natural wine circles. The Grande Waldo is a serious, fresh and juicy orange wine and the herbaceous notes paired nicely with a dish of beans and tomatillos (and almond and bay leaf milk). It’s made from a blend of grapes from his Pradis and Bosc di Sot vineyards with vines that date as far back as 1910. It was a good introduction on this trip of three varietals that I would come across again and again in Friuli: Friulano (aka Tokaj Friuliano), Malvasia Istriana and Ribolla Gialla.
Orlando & Didoné Schioppettino 2020
Back over the border, just over the border, in Friuli I stopped at Antonia Klugmann’s restaurant L'Argine a Vencò in Collio, where of lot of Friuli’s best whites are coming from and has its own DOC. I’ve heard the phrase Italy’s Ana Roš many times because Klugmann. Is a woman and is in the same general region, though I feel that is a cheap description. Both are quite unique. It was dark when I arrived and I could only barely make out the surrounding hillsides and the exterior of the restored mill that houses the restaurant. This particular menu used lots of the bitter herbs of early fall and some at the table I was at thought it to be too much, but I appreciated the way those flavors interacted with the wine. The sole red was from schioppettino, a grape that was nearly extinct in the 1960s and is slowly being rediscovered. It was from obscure winemakers Giacomo Orlando and Luca Didonè, who started making wine in 2017 and have vineyards and a small cellar in Craoretto. Served with a venison in red wine, Swiss chard and radish its strong notes of white pepper became increasingly intense and lingered in the mouth with each bite.