Oslavia is four kilometres above the centre of Gorizia, at the eastern edge of Italy, and the border with Slovenia runs through the vines. The ridge sits at 150 to 200 metres in the Friuli Collio, on ponca, the crumbling marl and sandstone that every grower here will put in your hand. At the top of the hill is the ossuary of 1938. Below it, on a Tuesday at the end of October, I parked outside the Gravner cellar at 10:00 in a thin drizzle, the thermometer at 11 °C.
I had an appointment made weeks before, and I had come alone. Mateja Gravner met me under the eaves. She said we would start outside, since the rain was the kind that stops, and it did.
A family on the ridge since 1901#
The Gravners have been in Oslavia since 1901 and have bottled under their own name since 1973. The estate is about eighteen hectares, some of them on the Slovenian side of the line. Joško Gravner has run it for decades, and his daughter Mateja works beside him and speaks for the house, which she does quietly and in complete sentences.
Two grapes only. Ribolla Gialla, the Collio’s own thick-skinned white, and Pignolo, a fiercely tannic Friulian red that the estate holds back for ten years or more before release. The old Breg white blend is no longer made; the Rujno red is on hold, the estate says, until at least 2035. Nobody writes sentences like that about a wine list unless time is the main ingredient.
I first drank a Gravner Ribolla years ago in Prague, poured by a friend who had kept the bottle a decade and refused to chill it. The colour stopped the conversation. It was not white and it was not orange; it was strong tea held up to a lamp. I have been trying to explain it to guests ever since, and the honest answer is a drive to Oslavia.
Georgia, 2000, and eleven jars#
The story every sommelier tells is true and short. In 2000 Joško Gravner travelled to Georgia and saw wine made in qvevri, the large clay vessels buried to the neck in the cellar floor. In 2001 he buried eleven of them in Oslavia, and the 2001 Ribolla was the first partly fermented in clay, about three months on its skins. More jars followed. Skin fermentation was already back in the village, at Radikon in the same village since 1995; the qvevri were Gravner’s own answer to the question of what to ferment it in.
The qvevri room is the quietest place I have stood in Friuli. The jars are sunk into the floor with only their lids showing, lined inside with beeswax in the Georgian way. There is no temperature control. Clay in the ground holds a steady temperature on its own, and the egg shape drops skins and seeds toward a narrow bottom where they do least harm. If you have stood with me in Kakheti, you know the room before the lights come on. The vessel itself, and why a qvevri is not an amphora, is in my piece on qvevri, karas and amphora.
Four times six#
Mateja gave me the rule for the Ribolla the way you give a recipe you have said a thousand times. Six months on the skins in qvevri. Six months in qvevri again, off the skins. Six years in large botti of old oak. Six months in bottle. The wine reaches the market about seven years after the grapes came off the vine.
Everything ferments on its own yeast. During the fermentation the cap of skins is pushed down by hand. Nothing is filtered; the years in botte do the clarifying, and the wine arrives in the glass clear. A little sulfur goes in at bottling and nothing else does. The public philosophy is that the vineyard and time make the wine and that the cellar’s job is to stay out of the way. The cellar looked like it: casks, floor, lids, a hose, a cat asleep on a lid.
“People ask what we do for six years,” Mateja said, tapping a botte with two fingers. “We wait. It sounds easy. It is the hardest thing in this building.”
I asked Joško, when he came through the room, what he wanted a guest to know before the first glass. He said they should not drink it cold. That was the whole answer, and it was enough.
One glass: Ribolla Gialla 2015#
We tasted standing at a barrel head, from bottles at cellar temperature, which is how the house wants its wine served.
The Pignolo that followed was dark and severe and plainly built for another decade; it wanted a piece of aged Montasio, and we gave it the cheese.
Lunch in Gorizia#
There is no restaurant at the cellar, so I did what I do with a group: drove the four kilometres down to Gorizia with a bottle of the Ribolla in my bag. Lunch was a plate of San Daniele ham, then frico, the Montasio and potato cake that is Friuli’s answer to most questions, then a shoulder of roast pork with fennel. The Ribolla with the pork was the pairing of the day: the fat of the meat met the tannin and the two cancelled out, and what was left was apricot and salt.
Gubana, the walnut and raisin spiral of the Natisone valleys, closed it. Coffee. The rain had started again outside, which in the Collio is only weather.
Gravner on tour#
I will be plain about the door. Gravner is not a cellar with a tasting room and opening hours. Appointments are rare and mostly for the trade, and I do not promise a door I have not confirmed. On the Friuli and Collio orange wine tour the Gravner Ribolla is on the table on the first evening beside a pressed, steel-fermented Collio white from a few kilometres away, and that pairing does more than any cellar visit to explain Oslavia. If the door opens for a small group that year, it is a gift, and I will say so when I confirm the departure.
Guests who have done my Piedmont tour ask me where to go next, and I say Friuli. Nebbiolo teaches you tannin in a red; Ribolla from Oslavia teaches the same lesson in a white, and the second lesson lands harder because nobody expects it. On the last night in Alba I have been known to open a Gravner for exactly that reason.
I drove back toward Cormons in the early dark with two bottles I will not open before 2030. Seven years to release, and then the buyer’s patience begins. Joško Gravner would say that is the correct order of things.
