Leveraging Wine & Tourism in Collio DOC

July 30, 2024 By Mike Veseth in Italian wine, wine, wine markets, wine tourism 1 Comment

[This is the second in a series of articles inspired by our recent visit to Collio DOC in north-east Italy. Click here to read last week’s introductory report.]

When Sue and I first visited Collio in 2000 we stayed in the newly opened agriturismo rooms at Venica & Venica and in a rustic cabin at La Subida. We dined well at several memorable restaurants including Trattoria al Cacciatore at La Subida and Trattoria al Giardinetto in Cormons.

Wine Tourism and Economic Development

Guided by articles in Gambero Rosso and La Cucina Italiana (and Ornella Venica’s wise personal recommendations), we found great food, wine, and many fun things to do. The foundations of today’s wine tourism industry were already in place. We returned to Collio in 2015, 2019, and now in 2024. We’ve discovered new hospitality and wine tourism opportunities each time.

A strategic focus on wine tourism makes good sense for Collio and the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region generally. The vineyard area is relatively small compared to the Veneto, for example. Yields are necessarily limited to protect quality. From an economic development standpoint, the two ways to grow for the region are to increase price (through rising reputation, for example) and to leverage the wine’s magnetic pull through tourism development. Both forces are powerful in Collio and they can work together to drive the region forward.

Casanova & Castle, Wine & Golf

More and more high-quality hotels and restaurants can be found today, which is necessary but not sufficient for the growth strategy. This time we stayed at the Relais Russiz Superiore, for example, adjacent to the famous winery (which is now owned by a partnership between Marco Felluga and the Veneto’s Tommasi Family). One of our favorite wineries, Gradis’ciutta, offers visitors the opportunity enjoy the hospitality of Borgo Gradis’ciutta, a cluster of buildings that date back to the 1500s with nine rooms and three apartments. Engaging visitors beyond the tasting room counter is clearly a priority today.

The most ambitious investment in tourism and hospitality is probably Castello di Spessa, where we stayed during our 2019 visit. The business combines the historic castle (famous for its connection to the notorious Casanova!), hotel rooms, dining and event facilities, well-kept vineyards, a substantial winery operation, and even a golf course. We ran into California winery owners in Collio on holiday, who said that they came for the golf and stayed for, well, everything else!

Collio was a great place to visit 20 years ago and it has grown in every way, but without losing the characteristics that drew us to it originally (and have kept us coming back). But this is just the beginning, according to Ornella Venica, who challenged us to consider how much more Collio and Friuli have to offer to visitors interested in food, wine, history, culture, and nature.

The Vine Academy

Our first stop on this trip to Collio was lunch at the recently opened restaurant at Accademia Vine Lodge. The food and wine were delicious and the setting beautiful, but what sticks in my mind is the fact that this attractive wine tourist destination is also an education institution. When wine tourists are not filling its rooms, groups of earnest students move in.

The Accademia Vine Lodge has a double personality. It is both an attractive venue for visitors like us and also the home of the famous Simonit&Sirch vine pruning institute. The restaurant’s wine list includes bottles from Collio and the region, of course, but also from some of the more than 150 Simonit&Sirch clients around the world.

The vine lodge fascinates me because it reminds us that wine tourism can spring up in many ways. It isn’t just wineries with food or rooms, for example. Here is a case where globally respected technical expertise in the science and art of vine pruning has grown into a venue that has broad appeal.

Collio & the Beach

A highlight of our visit was an evening event called Collio & the Beach, set on a broad shaded patio beside the beach at Baia di Sistiana near Trieste. Could a seaside party draw a different demographic profile than typical winery tasting rooms? This was a wine event, but not just a wine event. Bustling booths were pouring local wines, for example, but the longest lines were for delicious foods such as porchetta, frico, watermelon, and hand-carved local Prosciutto d’Osvaldo.

We sampled from the different wine stations, eventually focusing on Friulano because it is so popular in this region. We were surprised, however, that the longest line was for Pinot Grigio! In fact, the line never ended because some folks got their pour and moved directly to the back of the queue so that they could try another wine.

Pinot Grigio? Really? Here in America, Pinot Grigio is often made in unexceptional styles, designed more to avoid offending than to develop distinctive characteristics. But these Pinot Grigio wines were different because many of them were made in that traditional Ramato style, with lots of skin contact. These wines, which are both old-fashioned and cutting-edge in terms of style, had appeal that spanned the generations. And they matched up perfectly with the traditional food and festive venue.

The 70 Percent Solution

Sue and I keep returning to Collio because offers so much that we enjoy and appreciate in terms of food, wine, culture, and nature. It seems to us that Collio today is doubling down on the “Collio Experience” and not just the wine. That was the case at Collio & the Beach and Castello di Spessa. And the experience especially stood out at Subida di Monte in Cormons.

Once upon a time, this was a small family winery, but new owners saw the “experience” potential to leverage the winery with hospitality investments, including Locanda alle Vigne. The restaurant features traditional dishes in a fabulous setting. We were there on a late June Thursday night and the place was packed with guests of all ages.

The winery anchors the operation, of course, but the hospitality business generates 70 percent of the revenues, bringing more and different consumers to Collio and its wine.

Back to the Future?

Our Collio journey began at Venica & Venica and La Subida and both are still leading the way. The plans for a wine resort that Giampaolo Venica showed us in 2000 are now very much realized, for example. Very impressive!

La Subida has created a more casual restaurant called Osteria la Preda de la Subida that’s become one of our favorite places to eat. It is popular with tourists, but delights locals, too, with its celebration of the traditional food and wine of the region. It’s where we had our last meal (for this trip) before heading for our airport hotel near Venice.

Collio shows that wine and hospitality are two industries that can leverage each other to generate both happy visitors and also economic development opportunities. Other regions should take note!

Collio Revisited: Tradition & Change in One of Italy’s Great Wine Regions

July 23, 2024 By Mike Veseth in Italian wine, wine 2 Comments

Collio DOC is a tiny appellation snuggled up against the Slovenian border in north-east Italy. It is a beautiful place. How beautiful? After our recent visit to the region, I noticed that Sue changed her computer’s desktop image to a photo of these hills. Collio replaced another beautiful vineyard area, Cartizze, on the screen, which last year replaced a photo of the Douro Valley. The competition for real estate on Sue’s desktop is fierce. Collio is that beautiful.

2024 marks the 60th anniversary of the founding of the Collio Consortium and we were there to catch up with what is new in this dynamic region, best known for its stunning white wines. This was our fourth trip, having previously visited in 2000, 2015, and 2019. We are grateful to our Colliio Consortium hosts and to everyone who answered our questions and let us sample their wines.

Continuity and Change in Collio

Collio is a region of paradox and contradiction, which makes it very interesting indeed. Start with geography. Colllio is defined by its most distinctive common elements, hills and soil. As the map above (which hangs on Sue’s office wall) shows, Collio is crescent-shaped, with winegrowing concentrated in the hills at the two extremes. The soil profile here is called ponca, stratified marl and limestone rich in minerals and fossils, that resulted from the the rising seabeds that created the hills. Hills and ponca. That’s Collio. Seems pretty simple.

But it is more complicated than that and the wines can have great complexity because of variations in vineyard aspect, grape varieties, clones, blends, and winemaking methods. What seems timeless and simple on first glass is more like a kaleidoscope when examined closely.

And the region and its wines have changed over time, or at least that is how Sue and I have experienced it. We discovered Collio Sauvignon on our first visit and we were swept away by wines like the famous Venica Ronco delle Mele. These wines seemed to us to be a completely different take on this famous wine.

The More Things Change …

We still enjoyed the Sauvignon when we returned in 2015, but other wines caught our attention, including Ribolla Gialla and Friulano. I’m not sure if the style of the Sauvignon had changed or if we were just more open to these new varieties, but it was fun to explore them. Our 2019 visit was focused on Collio Bianco, which are blends of white wines of the region. These white blends were once “kitchen sink” wines meant to use up leftover grapes, but they work so well that they have become signature wines for many producers.

For this trip we explored all of the white wines, including also Pinot Grigio and Malvasia, in blind tastings led by the talented wine writer and Friuli wine expert Richard Baudains. One thing that stood out from the tastings, winemaker meetings, and winery visits, in addition to the overall excellence of the wines, was the rapid pace of change in the post-covid era. We found a lot to consider. A quick list includes:

Generational transitions

The Consortium’s 60 years is short in terms of the region’s wine history, but long on the human scale that defines family wineries. As in many parts of the world, this is a time of transition, with one generation seeking to pass the wine torch to another.

Sometimes the generational transitions are smooth, but sometimes less so. Children who have seen how hard their winemaking parents must work often opt for a different lifestyle. Or perhaps they have different ideas about what their wine should be. In Collio, we were told, one of the effects is that more women were finally entering the industry.

Back to the Future wines

I think the generational transition must have gone well at Polje, for example, where we talked with winemaker Sebastian Juretic while sipping his fine wines and looking our over desktop-worthy vineyard views. He loved the winemaking life with all its travails, but he didn’t want to make wines just like his father had, so we tried his Labuccia, an amphora-fermented Ramato-style wine.

Ramato is a traditional Friuli style of wine, with extended skin contact to create a copper color. Ramato is part of the new Collio but it is rooted in the past. Indeed some say that this region is the cradle of orange or skin-contact wine. Sebastian showed us photos of his grandparents making wines like his, but in old-fashioned open tanks, not sleek stainless steel.

Investment from outside the region

Several forces are at work driving increased investment in Collio wine from outside the region. Generational change is one of them. This factor was part of the story, we were told, of the iconic Jermann winery’s 2021 acquisition by the Antinori family.

Economic forces are also important. Tenuta Borgo Conventi, for example, is now part of the dynamic Villa Sandi group as that important Veneto wine group has expanded to other Italian wine regions in order to build scale and diversity in its portfolio of offerings. I was discussing this with Borgo Conventi winemaker Paolo Corso over a glass of his fine Sauvignon when I remembered where I had tasted the wine before. It was during a lunch last year at Villa Sandi. The winery executives there were proud to show off this important part of their collection.

This is not a new trend. Collio’s distinctive wines have long attracted attention from outside the region. Attems has been part of the Frescobaldi group for more than 20 years. However, the combination of generational transitions and market forces today seems to be strengthening the investment flows.

Small is Beautiful

Collio is a very small wine region. The Consortium has only about 300 grower and producer members farming 1300 hectares and producing 7 million bottles. Just a drop in the global wine bucket, if you know what I mean.

But the wines are distinctive and differ both from other Italian regions and from each other, but with the hillside and ponca common thread to tie them together. Now more than ever, it’s the kind of place and the style of wines that people are seeking out.

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Sue and I send our thanks to everyone who took time out to meet with us during our brief visit to the Collio region. Special thanks to Lavinia Zamaro, Guilia Formichetti, Federica Shir, and Richard Baudains. Cheers to Dutch wine writer Fred Nijhuis, who shared his insights with us during this trip.

Wine Book Review: Italy in a Wineglass

July 16, 2024 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, Italian wine, wine, wine history 1 Comment

Italy in a Wineglass: The Story of Italy Through its Wines by Marc Millon (Melville House Publishing, 2024).

They say that every glass of wine tells a story, so if you get enough of the right wines together, can they tell a really big and complicated story? Can you tell the history of Italy through its wines?

That’s the challenge that drives this very interesting new book by Marc Millon. Sue and I recently returned from a trip to Collio in Italy’s northeast near the border with Slovenia (watch for our first report next week) and Millon’s book kept me engaged during the long trans-Atlantic flights. I am a fan.

Zooming In and Out

The story is organized chronologically because the idea is to tell a history (you’d probably do it by region if wine itself was the point). The chapters follow a set pattern that I call PGP for Particular-General-Particular. Particular, to start off with something concrete, then zoom out to General to make broad points, then focus on Particular again to drive home the point. It’s a very effective way to tell a story.

Millon begins each chapter with a personal vignette that evokes a particular time, place, wine, and usually good food, too. If you’ve been to Italy a few times it’s likely that you will be familiar with some of the places that Millon visits and the experiences he reports. A concrete personal connection is made.

The vignette is chosen to launch us into a more general discussion of a slice of Italy’s rich political, social, and economic history. Millon’s style here is fluid and footnote-free. Not simple in terms of ideas, but not difficult to understand. The history section almost always finds a way to bring the development of Italy’s wines and wine industry into the story.

Finally, Millon zooms in to provide detailed profiles of a few particular wines that he has chosen to illustrate some particular point. If the vignette introduction and the historical centerpiece haven’t hooked you, the stories of the wines surely will. I was interested that a couple of the wines that Millon chooses were also on the list I compiled for my book Around the World in Eighty Wines, and for pretty much the same reasons.

Conflict and Economy

Two noteworthy threads run through the book. The first is war and conflict, which has a big impact on wine, generally not in a good way. This especially hit home for me since we were headed to Friuli, where so many battles have been fought over the years (and indeed, Millon’s chapter on Wars and Wine opens in Cormons).

The second thread is economic change. We learn a lot about changing systems of wine production (feudal, sharecroppers, cooperatives, the “economic miracle,” and more) and how they have affected wine, wine producers, and the wine industry. If Italian wine economics were all you cared about, this would be a good introduction because the key elements are there, set firmly in a broader context.

How does Italy’s history (and its wineglass) conclude? Millon brings his book to a close by surveying the many problems facing Italian wine and wine more generally in a chapter he calls “Back to the Future.” He even offers a few wines to help the reader think through the journey (Gravner’s Ribolla Gialla from Friuli is one of them).

By the last glass, you’ve learned a lot about Italy, Italian wines, and how they are connected. An excellent read! The only thing that would have made it more satisfying is if Delta Airlines offered better wines (preferably fine Italian wines) for its passengers to enjoy while reading Italy in a Wineglass at 38,000 feet!

Chilling Out: The Red & White of Austrian Wines

July 9, 2024 By Mike Veseth in wine, wine markets 5 Comments

Austria’s colors are red and white. Those are the colors of the national flag and the uniforms of the country’s football team, too. You can see them clearly on the bottles of many Austrian wines because a seal atop the bottle continues the red and white theme.

Blessings and Curses

Red and white. That’s Austria and its wines. But what do people think of when they think about Austrian wines? Not the red. Just the white. Riesling, of course, and increasingly Gruner Veltliner. Delicious wines that are Austria’s vinous ambassadors to the world.

That’s the blessing and the curse of “signature” grape varieties. They help define a region or country in a crowded wine market, but they also make it difficult for any other type or style of wine to break out. This is the wine variation of the economic principle of the “Dutch Disease,” which holds that, under some circumstances, great success in any one sector of the economy creates barriers to success elsewhere. Austrian red wines are victims of the Gruner Veltliner’s curse.

Cool Reds

The Austrian Wine organization aims to lift the curse by giving Austrian red wines a strong identity of their own. The theme is “chillable reds,” which is a category of wines that I see mentioned more and more (today’s email includes a note from California’s Ridge Vineyard is promoting its varietal Valdiguie as a “chillable red”).

You can chill any red wine, I suppose, and it is conventional wisdom among wine geeks that most red wines are served too warm (and most white wines too cold). But what makes a red wine particularly suitable to this category? Think light body, low alcohol, fruity, juicy, refreshing. What’s not to like?

Sue and I enjoyed many red wines of this type when we lived in Prague for a couple of summers (back in my professor days). The red wines (from Slovakia, Czechia, and Austria as I recall) were great with a bit of a chill at the end of a warm day.

Austrian’s “chillable red” category is quite diverse, beginning with wines made from the Zweigelt grape variety (which accounts for 45 percent of red vineyard plantings). Other winegrapes to look for include Sankt Laurent, Blaufrankisch (a.k.a. Lemberger here in Washington state), Pinot Noir, and Blau Portugieser. The wines differ in many respects, but share a common thread of light body and good acidity. You would not be a fool to spend the rest of the summer exploring these wines and others like them.

Austrian Wine sent us a couple of wines to sample and they showed the diversity of this category very well. The Sankt Laurent from Christina Wines was light and fresh, with sour cherry and cranberry flavors. Reminded me a bit of Beaujolais, which makes sense because of whole-berry fermentation. A fun wine and only 11% abv.

The second wine was a Pinot Noir “Langenlois” from Weingut Jurtschitsch. Pinot Noir is familiar territory, so it was interesting to see how this wine captured the essence of its cool climate terroir. Here in Washington state this is the type of wine we enjoy chilled down a bit with grilled sockeye salmon because it has structure but without weight. There are lots of situations where that’s just what we are looking for. I have to admit that the “chillable red” category includes some “swimming pool” wines, but they aren’t all so simple.

The Big Chill?

What does chilling do to red wine? I suppose it depends on the wine. I remember tasting one very popular wine with lots of tannins and residual sugar. I needed to chill it way down just to drink it. But with nice wines like those we tasted from Austria I most appreciate how chilling affects the texture and reinforces the juicy appeal.

What does chilling do for Austrian red wines in terms of their market appeal? I think the Austrian producers hope it will help their wines carve out a distinct identity and guide buyers interested in this style of wine to the part of the wine wall where the red and white bottle tops can be found.

Wine in America: An Independence Day Flashback

July 2, 2024 By Mike Veseth in book reviews, wine, wine history Leave a comment

It is an Independence Day tradition here at the Wine Economist to use our national holiday as an opportunity to reflect on wine in America and American wine. This year we take a historical perspective by re-printing a book review from 2020 that offers a fascinating glimpse of changing American attitudes toward wine in general and American wine in particular. Enjoy!

Book Review: Wine & the White House

Wine and the White House: A History by Frederick J. Ryan, Jr. (White House Historical Association).

wh2 President Trump doesn’t drink beverage alcohol and neither does Vice President Pence, and yet wine is a constant at White House state dinners and similar events. What’s served is nice wine, too, according to records found in this rather fascinating new book.

A state dinner for French President Macron on April 24, 2018, for example, included Domaine Serene Chardonnay (Oregon), Domaine Drouhin Pinot Noir (Oregon), and Schramsberg Cremant Demi-Sec sparkling wine (California).

Apart from the Prohibition years (when, if there was wine in the White House, it wasn’t served in public settings), wine has always been a White House staple and having your wine served at a state dinner has been the ultimate celebrity endorsement.

Wine and the White House is a big book (more than 400 pages), beautifully produced, generously illustrated, and full of information. It is not a book to read from cover to cover, but rather something to dip into and enjoy. There are wine-driven profiles of each president in one section, an examination of the White House collection of wine glasses, decanters, and other wine paraphernalia, and even surveys of the different wine regions (and some of the producers) that have featured at White House events.

The author, Frederick J. Ryan, Jr., is Chairman of the Board of the White House Historical Association, a perch that gives him access to important source material. He was Assistant to the President under President Reagan, the founding CEO for Politico, and is currently the Publisher and CEO of the Washington Post.

This book was created with a diverse audience in mind. There are sections on wine basics, for example, for history buffs who might not know a lot about wine. And there are other sections to guide wine people who might not have brushed up on their American history in a while. And, of course, there is a lot of material that both wine people and history people will find new and interesting. You can pretty much open any page at random and find something you are happy to look at or read.

The chapters that I like best focus on the wines that presidents served to their guests at state dinners and similar events. There are menus going back to 1877, for example, with relatively complete data (including reproductions of the actual menus) starting with the Eisenhower White House years. I’m interested in these documents because they give a sense of how Americans and their leaders thought about wine in the postwar years and how those attitudes evolved.

f4758b03499942eadac83252f0119173 Fine wine meant European wine in the 1950s. Eisenhower’s guests were only very occasionally served anything else. A typical Eisenhower state dinner started with Dry Sack Sherry, Spain, and then moved on to Chateau Climens Barsac, France, and what is listed as Beaune Greves Burgundy, France. Pol Roger Champagne, France, brought the evening to a close. There were variations, of course, for particular guests. German Rieslings for Chancellor Adenauer and Lafite for Winston Churchill.

The Kennedy years saw the the range of wines broaden (more Rieslings and Soave, for example), but generally within a classic old world frame. Noteworthy: increasing presence of American wine (especially Almaden and Inglenook) and I noted Lancer’s Rosé from Portugal served at a luncheon for the Danish Prime Minister. Inglenook “Pinot Chardonnay” appears several times, a reminder that Chardonnay was still little planted in California in the 1960s and often went by this now-forgotten name on bottle labels.

LBJ’s White House dinners embraced American wine wholeheartedly, a trend that has continued. It is as unusual today for an international wine to be served as it was 70 years ago to see a domestic bottle on the table. The White House wine people were ahead of consumers more generally, especially early on, in their willingness to serve American wines to important guests.

It is also interesting to note that the range of American wines, once the trend got started, rather quickly moved beyond California (although that state’s wines still dominated). White House wine selections make a statement and it seems that this is intentional at least some of the time. Can you guess which president first served Texas wine or Michigan wine? Washington and Oregon have joined California as White House regulars.

Wine and the White House is a book that it would be fun to give or to receive. Pour a glass of fine Madeira (a wine that Jefferson bought by the pipe according to a reproduction of his inventory sheet) and enter this unique world. Wine and history pair very well indeed.