Reserve an eight night Collio trip in Friuli, based in Cormòns and San Floriano

The Collio is a crescent of hills about eleven miles long and four miles deep in the far northeast corner of Italy, with the Julian Alps standing behind it and the Adriatic twenty miles to the south. Roughly 3,700 acres of it carry vines. Nothing in it rises above 900 feet, which sounds like easy country until you walk a row, because the whole crescent is folded into short steep ribs and the plantings run straight up and over them instead of around.

Reserve an eight night Collio trip in Friuli through this office and you get four nights in the market town of Cormòns at the foot of the hills and four on the ridge at San Floriano del Collio, with the rooms, the rail legs, nine cellar appointments, a car and driver for two afternoons and one dinner table all held before you leave home. Nobody travels with you. Past the transfer between the two bases, the map and the eight days are yours to spend in any order you like.

That is the third rung of five, and it is not the good one, because there is no good one. Lower down the ladder are weeks with somebody beside you from breakfast to the last pour. Higher up are weeks where two or three hard things are held and you build the rest on the ground. This rung is for the traveller who wants nine doors already open at named hours and wants nothing else arranged at all.

The rock, the rain and what grows on it

Growers here talk about ponca before they talk about grapes. It is a flysch: thin alternating bands of marl and sandstone laid down on a sea floor and later tipped on edge, and it breaks into flakes in the hand like stale pastry. It takes water in and gives it back slowly, which matters in a district that receives about 57 inches of rain a year and takes most of that in autumn. The same rock turns the tractor lanes to grey slurry within an hour of a hard October storm.

Friulano is the grape you will meet most often, and it has carried that name only since 2007, when a ruling in Europe took the older name away and every label in the district had to be reprinted. Ribolla Gialla comes in last and thick skinned. On the ridge above Oslavia a small number of growers put white grapes into open wooden vats and leave them on their skins for two to eight weeks, and what comes out is the color of weak tea and sits at the table like a red. Malvasia Istriana, Picolit, Schioppettino and Pignolo take up most of what is left.

The farms are small. Ten to forty acres is ordinary, the winery is a shed across the yard from the kitchen, and the person pouring at the corner table is usually the person who pruned. That is precisely why the appointments have to exist before you fly. Of the nine we hold, seven have no sign at the road and no posted hour, and arriving at the gate unannounced gets you a wave and a shrug.

Cormòns, San Floriano and the road between them

Cormòns has about seven thousand residents, a wide square with arcades down two sides and an emperor in bronze in the middle, and a town wine room under those arcades that opens at eleven and pours a rotating list of local growers by the glass. It also has a station on the line between Venice and Trieste, which is the reason the week starts there and not up in the hills: you arrive and leave without ever having to drive.

San Floriano del Collio, the second base, holds about seven hundred people and sits on the ridge road at 900 feet. From the last bend before the village you see vineyards falling away on both sides, and the far ones are in another country. That line ran through wire until 2004, and down the hill in Gorizia it still crosses the paving of a station square, where a ring of mosaic set into the stone marks where the fence stood. This office does not answer questions about entry to any country. The week as reserved stays on the Italian side of the hills.

Fifteen miles north, Cividale del Friuli keeps an eighth century Lombard chapel with six stucco figures standing on its west wall, added to the world heritage list in 2011, and a high backed stone bridge over the Natisone about 72 feet above green water, blown up by the retreating army in 1917 and rebuilt the following year. South and downhill is the other history. Twelve battles were fought along the Isonzo between 1915 and 1917, the ossuary above Oslavia holds the remains of roughly 57,000 men, and the galleries cut through Monte Sabotino just under 2,000 feet up are open, unlit and about 50 degrees inside in August.

Mornings, the long shut afternoon and dinner at half past seven

Work here happens early. In September the first tractors are on the lanes before seven and the pickers are in the rows by half past eight, so the two morning appointments sit at ten and at half past eleven, an hour and a quarter each, six to nine wines on the table. Then everything stops. From half past twelve until half past three the district is shut and nobody apologizes for it. Afternoon appointments run at half past three and half past five.

On the two afternoons when three cellars fall in a line, a car and driver collect you at half past one and bring you back by seven. Those particular lanes are single track with grass down the crown, blind bends and a drop on the outside, and there is no version of driving them yourself after nine glasses that this office is willing to arrange.

Dinner starts at half past seven in the villages and the kitchens close at half past nine. The table held in advance is on the fifth night at quarter to eight, nine tables, no walk ins on a Friday. The other seven evenings you eat what the house has cooked or you book at the bar that morning. In October that means frico, grated cow's cheese and potato fried into a cake the width of a plate, and gubana, a spiral of sweet dough rolled with walnuts, raisins and grappa that the villages north of here have been arguing over for two centuries.

Reaching the Collio, and who sends you the bill

Pine Gazette Bookings LLC works out of 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312 in Metairie, LA 70001, and takes bookings across the New Orleans metro and the rest of Louisiana. It owns nothing that moves and nothing you sleep in: no vehicles of its own, no rooms of its own, no berths of its own. The company that runs these eight nights on the ground writes its contract with you directly and sends you its bill under that contract, and this office never stands between you and your money.

Airfare is not something this office sells, so reaching northeast Italy is your own arrangement, and the rail legs we hold start from whichever city you land in, which is why we ask that first. Tell us on the form below which eight nights you have in mind, whether one of you would rather not drive at all, and how far from a station you are willing to sleep. Putting a real figure against a real set of dates takes two to four working days, because nine growers, two houses and one driver all have to answer before the number means anything. +1 (504) 832-6194 and bookings@thepinegazette.com reach the office during the working day, and corrections@thepinegazette.com reaches the person who wrote this page if something on it has gone stale.