Last month, I returned to the Collio wine region of Italy’s Friuli-Venezia Giulia. My goal was to visit producers, photograph the vineyards and taste wines. However, before I could craft and file any reports on the trip, massive floods struck the area. What follows is the account of one winery that was especially hard hit — the great Borgo del Tiglio, long held in the highest esteem among aficionados for their expertly crafted white wines and for their preservation on viticultural heritage in the Collio. For this estate, which produces only 50,000 bottles of wine per year, the next few weeks and months will decide its future. Please find a bottle of their wine and buy it. What they represent is so precious to the heritage of Friulian wine.
Visiting Borgo del Tiglio in the Friulian hamlet of Brazzano is an experience I will never forget. On most of my wine trips, I visit a place once, and move on to the next winery. It is all I have time for. But with Borgo del Tiglio, I returned three times over two days because the mysterious beauty of its two vineyards had such a dramatic pull on me. There is a unique aesthetic to Ronco della Chiesa and especially its neighbor, Italo e Bruno: golden vines, crenelated walls and an open gate held my camera lens’s attention for hours.
The winery and its fabled Friulano vineyard, Ronco della Chiesa, are teetering on the brink.
On my final night in the Collio, I was able to enter the cellar and meet the soft-spoken winemaker behind the label: Nicola Manferrari. Known for his wizardry with oak barrels and lees aging, Manferrari often draws parallels to the great white wine estates of Burgundy with his work. In fact, the whole experience at Borgo del Tiglio felt like a visit to some place in Saint-Aubin: the textures of the stone walls, the color palette, the nearness of the hills, the obsession with the minuscule … even Manferrari’s stoic demeanor.
His son, Mattia Manferrari, has been learning the craft by his father’s side, and while he was sick with COVID during my visit, he kindly offered a lengthy interview a month later to discuss the terroir of the two vineyards. It resulted in this vineyard story profile, one of my favorite articles on Opening a Bottle.
But now, the winery and its fabled Friulano vineyard, Ronco della Chiesa, are teetering on the brink.
A Terrifying Night
On the night of November 16, a deluge of rain unleashed a horrific landslide of 27,000 cubic meters* of mud, stone, trees, plants and water. The slide carved out a chunk of the vineyard and slammed into the winery’s stone walls and three historic homes in the borgo.
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According to Mattia, the winery’s enologist, Matteo Betteto, climbed a ladder to try and rescue two neighbors from a collapsed home, but the slide overwhelmed them. He sustained a broken femur, but tragically, the other two did not survive. The borgo’s beautiful church, Chiesa di San Lorenzo Brazzano, was largely untouched, but the winery took the brunt of the slide’s impact. Lost was the estate’s archive of more than 10,000 bottles of older vintages dating back to the 1980s, but more concerning to the family is the instability of the entire structure that supports the estate’s financial future.
“The situation is very precarious,” Mattia told me this morning via email. “What now worries us most is losing the 2025 wine in the barrels trapped in our underground cellar.”
While it is physically possible to reach the barrels, local authorities are prohibiting entry out of safety concerns. But losing this vintage is not an option, and the estimate that it might take up to three years to access the cellar is an unworkable fate.
“For us it is a matter of life or death as a company,” Mattia added, underscoring their small size and artisanal ethos. “We cannot recover from one-year work’s loss. We presented a plan to safely consolidate the structure and extract the barrels but timing is essential in winemaking. Wine needs constant care and we [have] left it unchecked for 10 days already.”
Equally concerning is the status of the Ronco della Chiesa vineyard, which was terraced by hand and considered locally a monument to the old ways of Friulian viticulture. In the aerial photo above, you can see not only how the landslide carved off the vineyard’s right side, but the left side has been destabilized as well.
“[It is] the very last hand-made vineyard still thriving, but its heritage risks being lost if they will not let us operate there for up to three years. A vineyard without care after three years is destroyed, especially considering the heavy damage already sustained.”
The Long View
Other wineries and vineyards sustained damage on the night of November 16, including boutique producer Marta Venica as well as her extended family’s famous winery, Venica e Venica, where the office was flooded.
Around the world, wineries are most certainly taking note. The best vineyard sites are often on hillsides, with the winemaking facility located directly below. Vine roots are very effective at holding a hillside together, as are the stone and earthen terraces that make some viticulture possible. I’ve visited numerous landslide-prone regions where a vineyard’s role in local culture is not just a provider of conviviality and taste, but as a guardrail against erosion. However, terraces and vine roots in certain soils are no match for almost a foot of rain within a mere seven hours. Such dramatic events seem to be more and more common across Northern Italy. Winemakers across the region and the world are certainly taking note.
What You Can Do to Help
In the meantime, Borgo del Tiglio hangs on by its fingernails. But the Manferrari family is not looking to raise funds, at least not yet. Mattia told Stevie Kim on the Italian Wine Podcast that the loss of life in the borgo puts their difficulty in perspective, which I respect.
There are a few ways we can help. One is simply raising awareness and sharing this article, especially on social media. Also: Essential to Borgo del Tiglio’s business is selling the existing stock of wines in circulation. As someone who has tasted numerous vintages from this winery, I highly encourage those of you with the means to seek out their wines to help out this legacy estate of the Collio. Their white wines are built for age, and often perform even better with five- or six-plus years of bottle aging. I am including a few links where you can do just that, as well as the main search page on wine-searcher.com.
Flatiron Wines (New York)
2021 Borgo del Tiglio Sauvignon Dark Label – $87
2017 Borgo del Tiglio Collio Rosso Riserva – $80
2018 Borgo del Tiglio Collio Rosso Riserva – $94
Verve Wine (New York)
2020 Borgo del Tiglio Ronco della Chiesa Collio Friulano – $85 (The benchmark wine from the estate)
2023 Borgo del Tiglio Ronco della Chiesa Collio Friulano – $115
2022 Borgo del Tiglio Collio Friulano – $45
2020 Borgo del Tiglio Collio Friulano – $57
Vinfolio (California)
Vinfolio is selling numerous Borgo del Tiglio wines — including their rare red wines — by the half case.
Solano Cellars (California)
This wine retailer has nine different Borgo del Tiglio vintages to choose from.
Mattia’s Interview on the Italian Wine Podcast
*Some facts and notes in this article were sourced from Mattia’s interview this week with the Italian Wine Podcast, which I suggest you give a listen to. I was able to reach Mattia via email, but as one can imagine, he is very busy helping his father save the winery.
