Region & History

Pliny the Elder praised a wine that no longer exists under this name. It was called Pucinum, named after a fortress by the karst springs of the Timavo, near the Adriatic coast at Aquileia. Empress Livia is said to have credited it with her long life, claiming she drank no other wine. Aquileia itself was one of the largest cities of the Roman Empire, founded in 181 BC as a bulwark against the Alpine peoples, and from here wine was shipped to supply the legions along the Rhine and Danube. No one knows for certain which grape went into Pucinum. The name survived. The wine did not.

For centuries this land sat on a border that kept shifting. First the Patriarchate of Aquileia ruled, then Venice, then Austria. Along the Isonzo, the river that flows from the Julian Alps to the Adriatic, twelve battles raged during the First World War, cutting right through the vineyards. After the Second World War, the new state border was drawn in 1947 straight through Gorizia, and with it through the hills of Collio. One farmhouse suddenly had a door in Italy and another in communist Yugoslavia. Some families lost half their land overnight. The rock beneath had not changed at all.

Out of this rupture grew a determination you can still taste today. In 1968, Collio became one of the very first wine zones in Italy to receive DOC status. The Colli Orientali del Friuli to the east soon followed. Winemaking families who had been displaced rebuilt their estates on the Italian side, bringing with them knowledge accumulated over generations. Within a few decades, the region stood for something it had never represented before: oenological precision instead of border conflict.

The most recent turning point came from a single village. In Oslavia, right on the Slovenian border, Josko Gravner began experimenting with his remaining Ribolla Gialla after a devastating hailstorm in 1996. He fermented the white grapes like a red wine, on skins and seeds, first in Spanish amphorae, and from 2001 in Georgian qvevri buried deep in the cellar floor. The result was amber-colored, tannic, and smelled of dried apricot rather than green apple. His neighbor Stanko Radikon had already started with the same idea back in 1995, but stuck with oak barrels instead of amphorae. Two cellars in one village turned into a movement now known as orange wine, imitated everywhere from Georgia to Australia.