Ronchi di Cialla Schioppettino RiNera 2023

The Land

Cialla is a small valley in the commune of Prepotto, in Friuli's Colli Orientali, ringed by woods of chestnut, oak, and wild cherry. It is one of the region's named sub-zones and functions effectively as a monopole, since the Cialla designation appears on Ronchi di Cialla's labels because the family's holdings are the sub-zone. The soil is Eocene marl, called ponca locally: layered marlstone and marly limestone that breaks down into something roots can actually work, holding moisture through dry stretches and shedding it in wet ones. Vineyards sit around 200 to 230 meters, low by mountain standards but cool, with Alpine air spilling down from the north and the Adriatic to the south. Schioppettino grows almost nowhere else on earth, confined to a strip a few kilometers wide between Cialla and Prepotto.

The Wine

Schioppettino, also called Ribolla Nera, nearly ceased to exist. Phylloxera and two wars reduced it to roughly 70 surviving vines in all of Friuli, and because the variety sat outside Italy's official register, new plantings were technically illegal and subject to fine. Paolo and Dina Rapuzzi tracked down those remaining vines and planted the first modern Schioppettino vineyard at Ronchi di Cialla in 1971, then spent years fighting the paperwork that made the grape legal again. They took a Risit d'Aur in 1976 for the work. RiNera is the fresh, early-drinking expression of it: fermented in temperature-controlled steel with indigenous yeasts, given skin contact, and raised in steel rather than wood. Black pepper arrives first, the variety's signature, then wild raspberry, sour cherry, rose, and lavender. Wiry texture, nervy acidity, light tannin, and low alcohol by red-wine standards, near 12 percent in recent vintages.

The People

Paolo and Dina Rapuzzi bought land in Cialla in 1970 with an unfashionable plan: plant only local grapes. Friuli at the time was pulling out indigenous varieties in favor of international ones, and Schioppettino, Verduzzo, Picolit, Ribolla Gialla, and Refosco survived mostly in old manuscripts and older memories. The Rapuzzis went the other direction, and a meaningful part of the region's identity today rests on that choice. Their sons Pierpaolo and Ivan run the estate now. Farming is natural in practice, with no herbicides or pesticides and tightly controlled fungicide use, and the estate holds World Biodiversity Association certification as biodiversity friendly. Production across the range is about 115,000 bottles. They were among the first in Friuli to adopt low-impact integrated farming, decades before anyone thought of it as a selling point.

Food Pairing

Serve it cool, around 60 degrees. Grilled pork chops with a cracked black pepper crust take the wine's own peppercorn character and double it. Sausage and lentils, cooked down with onion and bay, meet its earthiness. Frico, the Friulian pan-fried potato and montasio cheese cake, is the regional pairing, and it works because the acidity cuts the fat cleanly. Roast chicken with thyme is the weeknight version. If you drink Cabernet Franc from the Loire or cool-climate Syrah, this is the Italian red you have been missing.