Schioppettino’s revival Ronchi di Cialla It takes a certain knack to find ways to become lost while traveling within a subsection of a region that in its entirety is roughly two-thirds the size of Connecticut. Yet, in looking for Ronchi di Cialla, in the town of Rosazzo of the Gorizia province in Friuli, the turn…
Category: Italy
Secrets of the Vine
The 120-year-old picolit presiding over Conte d’Attemis Maniago On an estate that stretches back a near half-millennium, it seems appropriate that the grande dame of the vineyard is a 120-year-old picolit vine. Used to make dessert wine, which was possibly enjoyed during Roman times and was once the toast of Europe’s 18th century courts, picolit…
A Snapshot in Time
The keeping of family, local history at Villa Rubini To pull up to Villa Rubini is to visit a vineyard frozen in a moment in time. Surrounded by grounds that date back to the 1500s, the still-standing Venetian villa was built in 1720 and has housed the Rubini family for more than 200 years. Patriarch…
Wine and Life at the Crossroads
Bastianich finds a homecoming in Friuli It’s one of life’s happy coincidences that stunning countryside scenes often provide the backdrop for vineyard settings. In the case of Friuli, a geographic pivot point between the Alps and the Adriatic and a crossroads between Near Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, Mother Nature has bestowed bucolic hillsides with…
Making the Map
Livio Felluga and restoration of vineyards to Friuli’s hillsides In Italy’s far northeast crevice, sandwiched between the Alps to the north and plains leading to the Adriatic Sea to the south, is the tiny jigsaw puzzle of Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Its soft rolling hills, colli in the local Friulian dialect, are home to the Colli Orientali…
Chasing Wine 