There is a particular quality of light in the Friuli hills just before the grapes are harvested — a gold that is not quite gold, a green that is not quite green, something in between that has no name in any language but perhaps exists, briefly, in a glass of Ribolla Gialla. This is a grape of great age and quiet stubbornness, one of those living things that simply refused to disappear when the world was busy modernizing, standardizing, forgetting. Ribolla Gialla has been documented in the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia since at least the thirteenth century, which means it has outlasted empires, plagues, border changes, and the slow erasure of so many other ancient varieties.
It endured. And there is something deeply moving about that endurance — the way a vine, rooted and wordless, simply continues. Szymborska once wrote about the miracle of the ordinary, the way a stone is a stone and yet is also everything a stone has ever been, all its geological patience compressed into one unremarkable surface.
A grape is something like that. The Civa estate sits in Colli Orientali del Friuli, those eastern hills that look, on certain mornings, as though they belong to a different century entirely — terraced, worn, breathing slowly. To make a Dosaggio Zero sparkling wine from Ribolla Gialla is to make a statement of radical honesty: no sugar is added after the second fermentation to soften the wine's edges, to flatter the palate, to apologize for what the grape actually is.
What remains is purely itself — the mineral sharpness, the citrus austerity, the fine, persistent bubbles that rise like small questions one after another, none of them expecting a definitive answer. We live in an age that distrusts austerity, that reaches always for sweetness as a form of reassurance. But austerity, in the right hands, is not punishment — it is clarity.
Think of the Bieszczady in early October, those Polish mountains that have not yet decided to become tourist infrastructure, where the beech forests turn amber without asking anyone's permission and the silence has a texture you can almost hold. There is a kinship between that silence and the clean, dry finish of a wine that has been allowed to be exactly what it is. Hesse understood this — the idea that the path inward requires the stripping away of embellishments, that truth lives underneath the decorative layer we paint over everything we are afraid to see plainly.
A Dosaggio Zero wine removes the decorative layer. It says: here is the year, here is the soil, here is the grape. Nothing else.
The method used in wines like this — the traditional method, with secondary fermentation in the bottle — is itself a kind of patience made physical. The wine rests on its lees, on the spent yeast that gave it its effervescence, for months or sometimes years, absorbing something of their texture, their breadth, a certain biscuity softness beneath the crisp surface. It is a slow conversation between a liquid and what remains of a living organism.
We do not usually think of fermentation as intimacy, but perhaps we should. There is something almost alchemical about the way carbon dioxide, that invisible ordinary gas, becomes something as improbably beautiful as a cascade of fine bubbles in pale gold wine. Ribolla Gialla, in its still form, is already known for its high natural acidity, its lean, aromatic restraint — qualities that once made it overlooked in an era that worshipped richness and extraction.
But those same qualities make it extraordinary in sparkling form, where acidity is not a fault to be corrected but the very engine of life and longevity. To drink it chilled, properly, perhaps in a tulip glass that narrows at the rim to hold the aromas close, is to receive a kind of transmission from a very old landscape. The landscape speaks in its own language: chalk, clay, the particular mineral vocabulary of the Ponca marl that underlies so much of Friulian viticulture, a layered rock that breaks apart in slabs and crumbles slowly into soil that both drains well and holds something essential.
Soil memory, some call it, though the scientists prefer 'minerality' and are still arguing about whether it exists at all. I prefer to believe it exists. I prefer to believe that the earth remembers, and that the vine, in its patient way, transcribes.
There is a ritual to opening a sparkling wine that we have largely reduced to spectacle — the unnecessary pop, the foam, the theatre of celebration. But the proper opening of a bottle like this one, carefully, with a slow release of pressure and a quiet exhalation of cool vapor, is a different kind of act. It is closer to uncorking a letter than to uncorking a celebration.
You are releasing something that has been developing in darkness, under pressure, in silence — which is not unlike what happens to us in the seasons of our life when nothing seems to be happening at all. The Friulian wine tradition straddles a cultural border that has shifted many times, absorbing influences from Slovenia, Austria, Venice, the old Habsburg world — and perhaps this layering of influences is part of what makes Ribolla Gialla so interesting, so resistant to easy categorization. It belongs fully to no single story.
It is, in that way, profoundly modern — or perhaps profoundly ancient, since the ancient world did not care much for clean categories either. To drink it is to sit at a crossroads for a while without needing to choose a direction. I think of the way Szymborska approached the smallest subjects — a cat, a number, an onion — with the gravity and tenderness usually reserved for great events, because she understood that the great events are hiding inside the small ones, the way the ocean hides inside a shell.
A glass of sparkling Ribolla Gialla is, in this sense, not a small thing. It is a summary of centuries of human attention paid to a single hillside in northeastern Italy. It is the distillation of the particular patience required to grow something, to wait for it, to transform it slowly, to wait again, and then to offer it — openly, without apology — to whoever happens to be sitting across the table.
And maybe that is all any of us are ever really doing: tending something slowly in the hope that it will, in its own time, become true. If this thread of thought leads you somewhere, you know where to follow it.
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