Joško Gravner — how one trip to Georgia changed wine forever

Before the turn, Joško Gravner was a technically accomplished modernist. In the Italian wine culture of the 1990s, that meant prestige: clean fermentations, controlled cellars, and whites that looked and tasted like the international market wanted them to. Skill was measured in precision equipment and in wines that travelled well.

Then came 1997, and a trip to Georgia. What he found there was not a trend but an older idea of wine — clay vessels buried in the earth, white grapes left on their skins, no temperature control, no additives. He came home with a completely different picture of what white wine could be.

Abandoning modernism cost him. Customers and reputation fell away for years while he rebuilt the cellar around a method most of Friuli had no language for. From 2001 he began vinifying in qvevri. The wines that followed would eventually define modern orange wine — but only after the world caught up to a domaine that had already moved on.

Qvevri are Georgian clay vessels buried in the ground. The tradition behind them is ancient — measured in millennia rather than marketing cycles — and still in use. Whole clusters go into the vessel; skins stay with the juice; fermentation and maceration happen without the temperature dials of a modern cellar.

Burying the vessel matters. The earth steadies temperature more gently than steel tanks and refrigeration. The wine moves at the pace of the season and the clay, not at the pace of a technician's setting. No added sulphur closes the circle: the method trusts fruit, vessel and time.

That is why qvevri sit so close to natural wine philosophy. Looking backwards here is not nostalgia. It is a refusal to treat the latest cellar as the only legitimate one — and a proof that an ancient technique can still make the most modern argument in the bottle.

Ribolla Gialla is indigenous to Friuli and Slovenia — a white grape of the borderlands, long local before it became international shorthand for orange wine. On its own it can be taut and floral. In Gravner's hands it becomes something else entirely.

Ribolla Gialla Anfora spends months on its skins in qvevri, then ages in large casks before release, with no added sulphur. The result is amber in colour, tannic, and marked by tea-like aromatics. It is widely treated as the single most important bottle in the history of modern orange wine — the reference against which later skin-contact whites are still measured.

Breg Anfora is the complementary cuvée: a blend of multiple varieties, also with long skin contact, deeper and more oxidative than the Ribolla. Where the Ribolla sets the category's centre of gravity, Breg widens the domaine's argument — broader, darker in tone, still unmistakably Gravner.

The transformation was lonely before it was celebrated. Distributors and customers left. Critics dismissed the wines. There was no settled category for amber, tannic whites made without sulphur and without temperature control — only the sense that Gravner had walked away from success into something illegible.

The turn came slowly. The natural wine movement gave his work a context; the orange wine category eventually gave it a name. What had looked like eccentricity began to look like foresight. Vindication did not arrive as a single headline. It arrived as restaurants, drinkers and growers treating Ribolla Gialla Anfora as a landmark — and as a generation of producers who no longer had to invent the category from scratch. The cost had been real; the recognition, when it came, was lasting.

Gravner's domaine sits in Oslavje, in Friuli Collio, near the Slovenian border. The landscape has changed hands more than once in the last century. Borders move; the hills and the Ribolla remain. Place here is not a postcard. It is a working edge between Italy and Slovenia, where varieties and methods have always crossed lines on a map.

Stanko Radikon, his neighbour, took a similar path at the same time — long skin contact on Ribolla Gialla, no temperature control, no added sulphur. Two producers in the same small corner of Collio arrived at the same conclusion without waiting for a trend report. That coincidence is part of the story: the borderlands were ready for a different white wine before the rest of the market had a word for it.

Gravner's broader significance is not only that he helped invent modern orange wine. He proved that a successful winemaker could abandon everything he knew and start again from an ancient method. That is a rarer act than inventing something new.

What his example gave the natural wine movement was permission to look backwards as a form of progress. On PACT's list of the world's 100 best natural wine producers, Joško Gravner stands at number three for that reason.