Dri Giovanni Il Roncat

A line held in Ramandolo

Since 1968, the work has returned to Verduzzo. Giovanni Dri, Winemaker at Dri Giovanni Il Roncat in Nimis, founded the estate in the Ramandolo hills and still holds its centre of gravity close to one wine. The house is family owned, small by design and by terrain, with 9 hectares of vineyards in the Colli Orientali del Friuli and Ramandolo appellations. Its name, Il Roncat, belongs to the locality as much as to the label, and that matters here. This is not a cellar built around range for its own sake. Ramandolo, Roncat Ramandolo and Uve Decembrine Ramandolo keep drawing the estate back to the same hillside, the same grape, the same sweet wine language of Verduzzo Friulano. Dri’s role as founder and owner gives the place an unusually direct line between decision and bottle. The house also works with Picolit, Schioppettino, Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso, Pignolo, Sauvignon and Cabernet, but the discipline begins with Ramandolo. The first written record of Verduzzo and Ramandolo reaches back to June 6, 1409, at a council banquet in Cividale del Friuli. Dri’s work belongs to that longer local memory without needing to announce it at the cellar door.

Verduzzo with tannin in the skins

Ramandolo DOCG depends on Verduzzo Friulano, also called Verduzzo Giallo, a white grape with tannin-rich skins that asks for a different hand than many aromatic whites. The estate works in mountain conditions, with vineyard elevations between 200m and 500m asl, where warm days and cool nights help hold scent and shape. Expansion is limited by the rugged ground, so the method stays close to the vineyard rather than to volume. Annual production sits at about 40–50,000 bottles, drawn from the 9 hectares. For Ramandolo DOCG, the permitted yield is 10 tonnes per hectare, and the wine is made from late-harvested and partially dried grapes. The technical balance is not decorative: sugar, acidity, alcohol and skin tannin have to settle into one line. Ramandolo Bianco requires one year of aging, with release no earlier than November 1 of the year following the vintage. Riserva requires three years, with release from December 1. Those dates give the wine time to move beyond sweetness into chestnut honey, fruit and the grip that Verduzzo can carry.

The cellar above Nimis

The cellar sits in the Ramandolo hamlet above Nimis, surrounded by vineyard rows and the quieter architecture of a Friulian hillside estate. The room belongs to a working property rather than a staged tasting address: bottles, local varieties, the slope outside, and the steady presence of a house that has stayed with its founding argument. The tasting room draws its texture from that nearness to the vines. Ramandolo is not treated as a dessert category tacked onto a broader program; it is the bench. Alongside it, Picolit and the reds from Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso, Schioppettino and Pignolo show how the estate reads the Colli Orientali without loosening its focus. The quiet is part of the work. In this place, the hillside sets the pace before the cellar does.

The next bottle stays close to the hill

The estate’s future is not framed as a turn away from its founding wine. It remains bound to Ramandolo DOCG, to Verduzzo, and to a compact family cellar where scale has physical limits. The concrete thing to follow is the same one that has carried the house since 1968: Uve Decembrine Ramandolo.