Collavini Benedete Ribolla Gialla 2025
£15.25
The wine
A star-bright straw colour frames a fresh, fruit-driven nose lifted by citrus notes of lemon verbena and grapefruit. The clean, tangy palate tempts with a nicely gauged butteriness and a long, lingering finish. Ribolla Gialla is Friuli at its most distinctive.
Ribolla Gialla is native to Friuli and the Slovenian border country, recorded there since the thirteenth century. It gives a lean, citrus-driven white with pronounced acidity and a faintly bitter finish, and it has become the region's signature grape for skin-contact winemaking, though this is made in the fresh, unoaked style.
The producer
Collavini
View all Collavini winesFour generations of Collavini have made wine in Friuli, and the family now work from the sixteenth-century Villa Canlungo at Corno di Rosazzo, in the hills of the Collio on the Slovenian border.
Friuli is Italy's finest white wine region and its history explains why. The land passed between Venice, the Habsburgs, Italy and Yugoslavia, and the vineyards carry varieties from all of them: Friulano and Ribolla Gialla are native, Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay arrived under Austrian rule, and the whole area was a laboratory for modern white winemaking in the 1960s and 70s.
The soil is ponca, a layered marl and sandstone that crumbles readily and lets roots drive deep, and it is the reason Collio whites have the mineral tension they do. Manlio Collavini also pioneered a long, slow tank fermentation for sparkling wine, and the estate remains one of the region's most recognised names across both still and sparkling.
