Feature Article

The grape in question; and the question is: Why isn't more of this grown in the U.S.?

Ribolla Gialla: A Napa maverick’s antidote to Cab

by Alan Goldfarb
March 25, 2009

Ribolla Gialla? It’s not a bowl of Jell-o. Nor is it a game of bowling played by the Italians.

No, Ribolla Gialla is a thirteenth century white grape variety indigenous to Greece (where it is known as Robola), to what is now Slovenia (where it’s called Rebula) and most popularly, in Friuli,
in the northeast corner of Italy near the Slovenian border.
“Popularly” though, would be a misnomer.

ase in point: I spent about a week in Friuli on a press wine junket soon after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Not once was I presented with a Ribolla. And in a look through two of the best-known wine atlases, Oz Clarke’s New Wine Atlas (Harcourt) and Hugh Johnson and Jancis Robinson’s The World Atlas of Wine (Mitchell Beazley), one can find nary a mention of Ribolla Gialla.

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