Vitovska

Vitovska is a white grape of the Karst — the windswept limestone plateau straddling the border between north-east Italy and Slovenia, where the Carso DOC and Slovenian Kras meet. It is grown almost nowhere else, and total plantings are small enough that the variety was close to disappearing before a handful of growers made the case for it in the 1990s.

The site shapes the wine more than the grape does. The plateau's soil is a shallow red iron-rich clay over fissured limestone, and the Bora — a cold, dry wind that funnels down off the mountains — keeps the vines stressed and the bunches healthy. The result is a wine with pronounced acidity, a firm texture and a distinctly saline, almost stony finish that growers there treat as the variety's signature.

Made conventionally, Vitovska is pale and restrained: pear, white flowers, green almond and a herbal edge. But the Karst is also one of the homes of modern skin-contact winemaking, and much of the region's best-known Vitovska spends days or weeks — sometimes months — macerating on its skins. That treatment deepens the colour to amber, builds a grippy tannic frame, and pulls the aromatics towards dried herbs, orchard fruit and beeswax without losing the salinity underneath.

It is a wine that suits food more than contemplation: cured Karst ham, olive-oil-dressed vegetables, brothy seafood, hard sheep's cheese. Serve it cool rather than cold — over-chilling flattens the texture that is the whole point.