(Smithsonianmag) - The world does not yet come to the Friuli region, and so much the better.

My love affair began dubiously one night at a restaurant in Venice 19 years ago when, as Americans are wont to do, I reflexively ordered a bottle of Pinot Grigio. The waiter returned with a bottle of his choosing and poured me a glass. Drinking it was like taking the first bite into a ripe golden apple, piercingly tart. I grabbed the bottle and studied the label as if it might contain the nuclear codes.

VENICA—that was the name of the producer. Below it: COLLIO. The word meant nothing to me; the word now meant everything to me. Later I did my due diligence. “Collio”—a derivation of the Italian word for “hill”—was the preeminent winegrowing district in the region just east of Venice, Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Never heard of the place. Truthfully, it had not occurred to me that there was any more east to go in Italy after Venice.

I caught a train to the immaculate small town of Cormons one morning in September. The trip took two hours and deposited me a mile from the city center. I closed the distance on foot and arrived at the tourist information center, which in fact was a wine bar, the Enoteca di Cormons. Several men with big red hands and redder faces were toasting and guffawing and flirting with the two women behind the bar, who in turn were pouring and fending off catcalls with practiced calm. Though I didn’t know it yet, the men were some of the region’s most illustrious winemakers, and the harvest was now behind them, though the revelry occurred year-round. I was in search of a bicycle to go visit the Venica winery. One of the bartenders, a hawkeyed woman named Lucia, spoke English and pointed me to a nearby hotel. Then she pulled out a map of the Collio wine district and traced the route to Venica in the village of Dolegna.

I mounted the only bicycle the hotel had to offer, a lowly specimen with half-deflated tires, and followed the signs to Dolegna. The air was crisp, the country road narrow and largely vacant. Just outside Cormons, the landscape exploded into cascades of terraced vines. I was immersed in a wine country I had not known existed. Twice I passed signs that read CONFINE DEL STATO. The Italian border. Slovenia lay a hundred yards yonder— indistinguishable from this sliver of Italy—and Slavic surnames were on the signs of many Friulian wineries I passed. I peddled onward. A castle loomed overhead to my right. The Judrio River to my left. Vines all around. Seven miles from where I had begun, Dolegna materialized, then disappeared, in 30 seconds’ time. Just past that finger-snap of civilization, a yellow sign pointed to the Venica winery.

The slender woman who greeted me inside the gates of the neatly manicured property was Ornella Venica, the winery’s domestic sales manager and wife of Gianni Venica, one of the two brothers who made the wine. I was at the time a writer for a Texas magazine, covered in sweat, with maybe 15 words to my Italian vocabulary and a boundless ignorance of the country’s territory to show for myself. Ornella sat me down beside a long wooden table. She poured me perhaps ten of Venica’s wines, most of them white, many with obscure grape names: Tocai Friulano, Malvasia Istriana, Ribolla Gialla, Refosco. I loved so many of them but had only one backpack. I bought four bottles, thanked her and returned to Cormons. Back at the enoteca, Lucia quickly snagged me a dinner reservation. She circled a spot on my map, just outside Cormons, and wrote down the name: La Subida.