Collavini Blancfumât Collio Sauvignon Blanc 2025
£16.45
The wine
An elegantly styled Sauvignon showing great typicity and minerality, with delicate hints of yellow pepper and sage. The palate is fresh, full bodied and confidently aromatic, running through to a long finish.
Blancfumat plays on the French pouilly-fume, and Friulian Sauvignon is closer to the Loire than to New Zealand: nettle, citrus and a flinty mineral character rather than tropical fruit. The ponca soils of the Collio give the tension, and cool nights from the Julian Alps preserve the aromatics.
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.
