Venchiarezza
Cividale del Friuli, Italy (Friuli)
Luca Caporale farms just outside Cividale del Friuli, at the northern edge of the Colli Orientali, with vineyards halfway between the Julian Alps and the Adriatic. Cold mountain winds which keep the grapes fresh and aromatic are met with warm sea air that ripens them fully. The farm goes back to the early 1900s, when Luca’s great-grandfather Antonio worked it the way everyone did then: a few rows of vines, fruit and grain, cattle and livestock. In the 1950s his grandfather Guido turned property into a real wine estate. He built a new cellar and, with a tinkerer’s streak, made the first grape destemmer in the area.
Luca remembers fondly growing up in those vineyards at Guido’s side. He studied wine, worked elsewhere for a while, but ultimately came home to restart the family business. His first decision was to farm organically, and he has never wavered from it; the estate has been certified since 2013. In 2014 he began his “Vigna del Tempo” project, taking cuttings from local vines more than half a century old and propagating them by massal selection. The results were good enough that he now plants every new vineyard this way, with no clonal material. He has also replanted native Friulian olive varieties, reviving a local oil tradition that the great frost of 1929 nearly wiped out. His philosophy is simple: he “makes wine with grapes,” and he has no interest in cellar tricks that bury the fruit.
Three wines show the cellar’s range. The Chardonnay comes from a 70-year-old vineyard and is aged in European oak without malolactic fermentation, so its acidity carries the richness. Adrian is Luca’s “reverse Bordeaux,” mostly Cabernet Franc with Merlot, named for the nearby Adriatic Sea and kept bright and spicy with short macerations. The Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso follows a family method: partially dried grapes and more than a year in barrel, for a deep, balsamic red that stays fresh. The estate also makes native Friulano and Schioppettino, an ancestral Ribolla, and zero-dosage Metodo Classico.
