Where a quarter of the world’s vines begin
When I want a small amount of Italy without committing to a proper journey, I get in the car and drive to Friuli. From Zagreb it is a few hours, which makes it the closest Italy is ever going to get to me, and over the years it has become the part of the country I know best.
There is an older reason I keep ending up there.
Croatia, where I am from, sat for decades on the other side of a border that mattered a great deal more than it does now. Jeans, coffee, shoes, records, almost anything from the west was either unavailable at home or cost a fortune. Trieste was an hour away and had all of it, and for about 20 years it was where this entire corner of Europe went shopping. I was a child when it ended, so I caught only the last of it, but I caught enough.
At the peak the city was taking as many as 100,000 visitors a day, buses arriving every few minutes, and the centre of it was Ponte Rosso, a square named after a bridge painted red in 1756. Nobody stayed the night. Nobody sat down in a restaurant. Everybody ate an enormous sandwich standing up, because a chair was time you could have spent buying jeans.
The detail I have never got over happened in the car park behind the bus station. At the end of the day people changed there, out in the open, putting on everything they had just bought, layer over layer, so that less of it would be visible to the customs officers on the way home. Jeans over jeans over jeans. In August.
On Mondays the shopkeepers walked to the bank with black bags of foreign currency to be turned into lire. So many banks opened branches in Trieste to handle the exchange that when it all stopped, several of them stopped too. It faded through the eighties and was gone by the nineties. Ponte Rosso sells flowers now, which is a gentler trade and, one assumes, a considerable relief to the people who live there.
I go for the wine. But I always park somewhere near the square.
Friuli Venezia Giulia has a name like a merger document because that is roughly what it is: two different places with two different histories, joined in 1947.
Friuli became Italian in 1866. Trieste and Gorizia did not. They stayed Austrian until after the First World War, by which point Trieste had spent 500 years as the Habsburg empire’s window on the sea, and it still looks like it. The city could be dropped into Vienna without anyone noticing, apart from the Adriatic. The coffee is treated with a seriousness the rest of Italy reserves for football, and Illy is headquartered there, which is not a coincidence.
Then the border moved again in 1947, and it moved straight through the hills. The Collio on the Italian side and Brda on the Slovenian side are one range of hills that woke up in two countries. Gorizia and Nova Gorica are one town with a line down the middle. For a number of families that line ran between the house and the vineyard, so that going to work meant leaving the country, which is a commute I have never had to explain to a tax office and would not enjoy trying.
In 2025 the two cities held the European Capital of Culture jointly. After the century those two have had, that is a more remarkable sentence than it looks.
The name itself is Roman. Friuli comes from Forum Iulii, the town now called Cividale.
Friuli grows a little over a dozen varieties commercially. Before phylloxera it grew more than 350, a figure I find genuinely painful to type.
What survived includes the best named grapes in Italy, and I say that having thought about it.
Tazzelenghe means “cuts the tongue,” which is a fair warning about the acidity. Pignolo means “fussy,” and refers to how hard it is to grow. Schioppettino comes from scoppiettio, to crackle or pop. These are names given by the people who had to grow the things, and nobody has since replaced them with anything more flattering, which I think was the correct decision.
Picolit is the region’s great sweet wine. It takes its name from piccolo, for the size of its clusters. The grapes are either picked late or dried after harvest, the passito method, and what comes out is floral in a very particular way, acacia and jasmine, with tropical fruit and honey, and enough acidity to finish clean rather than sticky. Drink it slowly and on its own, a vino da meditazione, or with aged Montasio and dried fruit.
It has its own DOCG and it arrives in half bottles at a serious price, and the reason for both is in the vine. Picolit carries a genetic mutation that aborts most of the flowers on each cluster, so in a decent year fewer than half of them become grapes.
In the 18th century Count Fabio Asquini marketed it so successfully, bottled in handmade Murano glass, that he shifted over 100,000 quarter litre bottles to the courts of Europe, which is a considerable achievement for a wine there was never going to be much of. It then came close to disappearing for exactly the reason you would expect and is still here because the Perusini family selected clones that were less punishing to farm.
Schioppettino nearly went altogether. It was not on the list of permitted varieties in Friuli, which is a bureaucratic way of saying it was on its way out, so in the 1970s Paolo Rapuzzi of Ronchi di Cialla collected 100 surviving vines and had them grafted quietly, without asking anyone. The law caught up later and conceded the point. The wine is dry and peppery with black cherry and a tight, angular frame, and it is still here because one man decided a rule was wrong and simply got on with it.
Friulano is the region’s own white, and until 2007 it was called Tocai Friulano.
The name goes back a long way. A dowry from 1632, when Aurora Formentini married a Hungarian nobleman, lists “300 vitti di Toccai” among the goods, which suggests the traffic in names was not one way. But Hungary has Tokaj, and Hungary had the better case. After a legal fight that went as far as the Court of Justice of the European Union, Italy was told the name belonged to the Hungarian wine and Friuli would have to drop it.
So they shortened it to Friulano, which I have always thought was the most elegant possible response. Fine. If we cannot call it Tocai, we will call it ours.
The wine is difficult to pin down. It runs from smoky and whitevpeppery to something lusher, with minerals, spice, and now and then a note like honey cake. Drink it with San Daniele and the argument is over.
The Alps behind, the Adriatic in front, warm days and cold nights. Grapes ripen properly here without losing acidity. In the Collio and the Colli Orientali the soil is flysch, a crumbly marl and sandstone the locals call ponca, and it suits white grapes about as well as anything in Europe.
The rest was a decision. In the 1970s and 80s, while most ambitious wine regions on earth were racing towards rich, oaky, barrel fermented whites, Friuli went the other way. Mario Schiopetto and Livio Felluga built a style that was lean and precise, and interested in the grape rather than the barrel. At the time it must have looked eccentric. It now looks like the only sensible thing anyone did that decade.
In 1977 Silvio Jermann, aged 21, made a white blend called Vintage Tunina from sauvignon, chardonnay, ribolla gialla, malvasia and picolit, and declined to say in what proportions. It became Italy’s first cult white. He later named a barrel fermented chardonnay after a U2 song, which tells you something about Friuli that no amount of soil analysis will.
Ribolla Gialla is where I would send anyone first. Aromatic, peachy, citrus driven, deeply satisfying, and grown almost nowhere except here and immediately over the border. Gorizia was already protecting it in the Middle Ages, imposing a duty on foreign wines specifically so that people would drink the local one. A protectionist wine law from the 1300s, and the motivation has not shifted an inch.
On the Carso, the limestone plateau above Trieste, the vines grow down inside the dolines, the sinkholes that form where limestone dissolves, in the red soil left behind. Three of the varieties there are entirely familiar on the Croatian side of the Adriatic.
Vitovska makes dry, fleshy, floral whites and grows essentially nowhere else on earth. Terrano is the backbone of the Carso DOC. Refosco is a family name rather than a single grape, the main one being Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso, refosco with the red stem, which makes a dark, blueberry scented, properly acidic red that people drink on weeknights without any ceremony at all.
And Malvasia Istriana says it in the name. It is permitted across most of the region’s appellations and it came from Istria, which is not far.
None of this is surprising once you look at the coastline rather than the border. These grapes were growing here long before the line was drawn, and a line on a map has never had much effect on what grows well.
In Rauscedo, near Pordenone, there is a cooperative founded in 1933 called Vivai Cooperativi Rauscedo. The skill came out of the First World War, when bench grafting was taught to farmers in the village, and they turned it into an industry.
It is now the largest vine nursery in the world: over 80 million grafted vines a year, exported to 38 countries. Around 60% of the vines planted in Italy come from there, and roughly 25% of every vine growing anywhere on the planet.
Which means a great deal of the wine in your house began in a Friulian village of a few hundred people that appears on no wine map at all. It is the least famous address in European wine and arguably the most important one.
Go in summer, though not in August if you can help it, when much of Italy shuts for the holidays and the coast fills up. The hills stay quiet either way. You can book a table on the day, turn up at an estate and find somebody with time to talk to you, and drive between appointments in 15 minutes. Base yourself around Cormons or Capriva del Friuli and most of the Collio is within reach of lunch.
Villa Russiz, at Capriva, is where I would start, and not only for the wine.
In 1868 the hill of Russiz Inferiore came to Elvine Ritter von Zahony as a wedding gift from her father, on her marriage to Count Théodor de La Tour. He was French, she was Austrian, and the land is now Italian, which is the Collio in a single sentence. He was a serious agronomist and planted French varieties here when almost nobody in the area had considered it.
In 1894 Elvine opened a school at Russiz for the poorest children nearby, admitting girls at a point when elementary schooling was for boys, and funded it from the estate. She died in 1916, during the war, when the villa was in use as a military hospital just behind the Italian front. A Red Cross nurse working there, Countess Adele Cerruti, picked the work up and ran it for the next 30 years.
That arrangement has run without interruption ever since. Villa Russiz is now a non profit foundation farming around 40 hectares of Collio across roughly 110 separate parcels, and the proceeds of the wine go to a home for children who need one. Not a percentage. The wine funds the house.
I went with a colleague, expecting a group, and it turned out to be the two of us and the woman who showed us round, who was exceptional company and knew the place from the inside. The wines are seriously good, and the Friulano stayed with me. So did the food. We left considerably later than the booking suggested.
Schiopetto, a few minutes away at Capriva, is where the modern Friulian white began, and the wines still make the case for the style Mario Schiopetto settled on fifty years ago. Marco Felluga is in the same stretch of hills, from the same generation, and worth the afternoon.
For dinner, Sirk della Subida at Cormons, on the road out towards the border, where the cooking sits between Friuli and everything on the other side of the line. I have also eaten extremely well at Castello di Spessa, where I have seen the restaurant and none of the cellar, which I intend to correct.
And what I have described is one corner of the region. The Carso, above Trieste, has the Vitovska and the Terrano. The Colli Orientali has the Picolit, the Schioppettino and most of the rarest grapes in this piece. Ramandolo, in the hills above Nimis, has had a DOCG of its own since 2001 for a sweet white made from Verduzzo.
The names in this article are the ones with the long histories and the export managers. The region is largely made up of growers who have neither, working a few hectares each, whose wines rarely leave the province and are the reason to go in person. That is the part I am still working through, and I expect to be working through it for years.
What I can say without hesitation is that the food is excellent across the whole region, the prices are reasonable in a way they are not further west, and people will talk to you. An afternoon disappears quickly here.
San Daniele makes the prosciutto, cured with no smoke and no heat over 400 days, in buildings with long vertical windows that let the cold Alpine air meet the salt air off the sea. With figs and a glass of Friulano it explains the region faster than this article has.
Cividale del Friuli sits above the Natisone gorge and is worth the drive on its own. Palmanova was begun in 1593 as a nine pointed star and still is one, visible from the air and now UNESCO listed. Aquileia, near the coast, was one of the largest cities of the Roman empire and still has a basilica with a 4th century mosaic floor as good as anything that has survived anywhere in Europe.
And every October Trieste holds the Barcolana, a regatta that regularly pulls more than 2,000 boats into the gulf and is generally called the largest sailing race in the world. The city fills up all over again. Different cargo.
On the way home I stop at Eataly in Trieste, down on the waterfront in the old Molo IV, and fill the boot. The range is genuinely excellent, the producers are properly chosen, and I like being in there more than I like being in most shops. Pasta, cheese, oil, things I did not come for and leave with anyway.
I am aware of the contradiction. I have just spent two days arguing that the point of this region is the grower with four hectares and no importer, and then I buy cheese in a building the size of a ferry terminal. In my defence it is open on a Sunday and it’s easy to park, but also, the shelves are a pleasure to walk, you can sit down and eat something very good while you are there. Good deal if you ask me.
There is still no Eataly in Croatia, which I have been complaining about for years to people who are in no position to do anything about it.
Nothing gets checked at the border now, and nobody has to wear it home. Which does take some of the romance out of it.
The only thing I would actually press on you is the Picolit. If you see a half bottle, buy it, because there is never going to be much of it and it will not be waiting for you on the way back. Everything else you can work out over lunch, which is the correct way to plan anything in Friuli!
There is a great deal of Friuli I still have not seen, which is good news. It is close enough that I do not have to do it all at once, and good enough that I would not want to!
Cin Cin!
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