Belluzzo 'Perla Nera' 2023

Belluzzo 'Perla Nera' 2023 — Refosco + Merlot • Colli Orientali del Friuli, Italy

Refosco is Friuli's own red grape, native to this corner of northeastern Italy, and Belluzzo blends it here with Merlot off 50-year-old vines in Tarcento — a town nicknamed "La Perla del Friuli," the pearl of Friuli, which is where the name comes from. Three generations deep: grandfather Marco started as a sharecropper in 1959 and planted the first Merlot rows himself in 1967, and grandson Luca (who's also the enologist at Jermann, one of Friuli's most respected estates) now farms it across 2.7 tiny hectares, hand-harvested, no herbicides, indigenous yeast where he can manage it. Low yields, made in genuinely small quantities.