Ribolla Gialla

Ribolla Gialla is an ancient variety of the hills straddling the Italian-Slovenian border, recorded in Friuli since at least the thirteenth century and known on the Slovenian side as Rebula. It is one of those grapes whose modern reputation was built almost entirely by a small group of growers who decided to take it seriously.

Unworked, it is a lean, high-acid white with green apple, citrus zest and camomile, thin-skinned and quick to lose freshness if handled carelessly. That version is pleasant and unremarkable. What changed its standing was skin contact. Beginning in the 1990s, producers in the Collio and the Brda began fermenting it on its skins for days, weeks or months in large wooden vessels or buried clay amphorae, reviving a technique that had never entirely disappeared in the region.

The results are wines with the colour of amber, a fine tannic grip, and aromatics that move from orchard fruit to dried apricot, tea, orange peel and nuts. They divide drinkers sharply, and they gave the category now loosely called orange wine one of its first internationally credible reference points.

The grape has a third career as a sparkling wine, both in the pét-nat style — bottled before fermentation finishes, cloudy, dry, low in alcohol — and in more conventional tank and traditional method versions, where its acidity is a real advantage.

What unites all three is the acidity and the texture. Ribolla Gialla is not an aromatic grape, and growers who treat it as one tend to be disappointed. Treated as a structural one, it turns out to be unusually versatile.