Grape Variety: Vitovska

Colour: White

Vitovska hails from the Friuli region of north east Italy and the Vipava valley in Slovenia, The cultural hub of the region is the border city of Trieste, which literally straddles the border between Italy and Slovenia, as do many of the vineyards in the area surrounding the city known as the Carso. This eroded plateau, which sometimes plunges steeply towards the sea, is home to many small winemakers whose families have been farming vineyards in the area for hundreds of years, while the lines of maps were drawn and redrawn around them.

The Carso, like Friuli in general, is packed with wine varieties that most of the world has never heard of. Italy as a whole is known for its wealth of indigenous grape varieties, and Friuli in particular is home to scores, perhaps even hundreds of them. These varieties, many of which are white, are a true national treasure as far as wine lovers are concerned, as they quite often fail to resemble any other wine grapes in the world when it comes to flavors, textures, and aromas.

Vitovska is one such variety. Found nowhere else in Italy but Friuli, and rarely found outside of the Carso region, this vine is about as far off the beaten path you can get when it comes to grape varieties (a good measure of which is always whether it appears in the Oxford Companion to Wine, which it doesn’t). Characterized by small greenish-gold berries it is apparently quite a hardy vine, used to cold winters, dry hot summers, and blustery winds. .

Zidarich’s version is fermented with natural yeasts in open-top wood vats where it sees contact with the skins for eight to ten days. Ageing takes place in mid-size Slavonian oak casks and the wines are bottled without fining or filtration. Zidarich’s wines are cloudy in colour, but that is simply the result of wines that have been made with a bare minimum of intervention. Like all whites macerated on the skins, these wines should be served at cellar temperature in large glasses. Representing the purest expression of varietal in its effusion of spices, pears, jasmine and flowers Zidarich’s Vitovska has a rosy, cidery haze to it and enticing aromas of yellow cherries, apples, pears and smoke. In the mouth it is dense, yet not heavy at all, honeyed yet dry and packed full of mineral flavours. It is almost a paradoxical wine, resting on that fragile border between lightness and weight, dry and sweet. It gives the wine tension and energy and makes me want to drink more of it.

In Trieste and its environs one might drink Vitovska with mussels, fresh anchovies or fried baccala. I imagine it would also be excellent with the gnocchi, risotti and the gorgeous local polenta with warm Montasio cheese melted into it.