Joško Gravner’s family has made wine in the villages of Hum and Oslavia for generations. Their vineyards sit on the foothills of the Julian Alps from which you can look out over the great light of the Adriatic. Friuli is a land that has been traded back and forth between countries for centuries and it has a fascinating blend of cultures: Italian, Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslavian, and Slovenian. Early in his career, Gravner embraced a style of technical white wines that were highly acclaimed but in the mid 90s he underwent a crisis of faith, realizing he simply didn’t enjoy drinking his own wines anymore. He journeyed into the Caucasus mountains in an effort to rediscover some direction within himself and encountered the millennia-old Georgian viticultural traditions of long skin maceration of white grapes aged in amphora. He returned to combine his formidable cellar skills with the Georgian style of skin macerated white wines and began creating some of the most profound, unique, long lived wines in the world. Joško says that “through [the land’s] cycles, its transformations, its inhabitants, its fruits and the work of the people – it is turned into something more and better than the mere sum of all these factors.” He believes that his interactions with his earth and the vines reveals a kind of truth.