Ribolla Gialla

Ribolla Gialla is an ancient white grape of the hills straddling north-eastern Italy and western Slovenia — Friuli's Collio and Colli Orientali on one side, Slovenia's Brda on the other — where it has been grown for the better part of a millennium. In its fresh, modern guise it makes a pale, dry, high-acid white of lemon and green apple, white flowers and a faintly saline, mineral edge — a bright, food-loving wine at home with seafood and prosciutto. But the same thick-skinned grape is also the emblem of the region's skin-contact revival, macerated on its skins for days, weeks or months to yield deeply coloured, tannic, savoury "orange" wines. Zesty and linear or amber and structured, Ribolla is the grape that best expresses the two faces of Friulian white wine.