IN PURSUIT OF THE PERFECT HAM IN LITTLE-KNOWN FRIULI

So here we are in Friuli, tucked away in a remote corner of the Alpine foothills in northeastern Italy, at the little restaurant La di Petros. We’re on the back patio in the scorching August heat with Giulio Colomba and his wife, Luisa. A high school science teacher, he’s the head of the local chapter of Slow Food, the Italian-based organization of artisanal food and wine lovers. We’re eating river crayfish, a summer specialty in these parts, and drinking widely and deeply of an assortment of the area’s crisp white wines. We are speaking mostly in English--his English is better than my Italian--though as the evening progresses, we do wander a bit.

Suddenly, there’s a hand on my shoulder and a booming Texas accent in my ear: “I’ve owned a house here for 15 years and you’re the first Americans I’ve ever seen!” Actually, we had come to Friuli almost by accident ourselves. I wanted Italy; my wife, Kathy, wanted mountains. We agreed that we wanted to go someplace we hadn’t been before, which cut out Piedmont. And we didn’t want a place likely to be overrun by tourists, which left out places like Val d’Aosta in northwestern Italy. I was stumped. So I posted a note to Slow Food’s Internet message group. I got a couple of long-winded suggestions for places that didn’t sound right. And then one brief message: “Why not Friuli?”

I have to admit that when I travel, history is not the first thing on my mind. Food and wine are. And that’s what sold me on Friuli. It is famous as a source of some of Italy’s best white wines. There are six officially recognized wine-producing areas in the region, many of them using grapes such as Pinot Bianco, Sauvignon Blanc, Gewurtztraminer and Riesling, which, though popular in the rest of Europe, are scarcely found elsewhere in Italy. Some of the best Pinot Grigios--seemingly the only white wine choice in many Italian restaurants in the United States these days--come from Friuli. So we went primarily in search of wines, unaware that we soon would make a culinary detour.

Occupying the extreme northeast corner of Italy, Friuli’s scenery ranges from rugged coastline along the Slovenian border to placid plains in the west and the majestic Alps in the north, where Italy butts up against Austria. Directly to the south is Venice, just a little more than an hour and a half away. In fact, in homage to the city’s traditional hegemony over the region, its full name is Friuli-Venezia Giulia.

Though off the beaten tourist track, Friuli is hard in the path of history. Standing at one of the major crossroads between Western Europe and the East, it was conquered by just about everyone who passed by. Since being settled by the Celts, Friuli has been contested in rough order by the Romans, the Huns, the Franks, the Lombards, the Venetians, the Austrians, the Yugoslavians and the Germans.

As a result, things look different here. Rather than the familiar cultural overlay of most of Italy, the central European influence is readily apparent in Friuli. The architecture tends more toward Austrian grandeur than Tuscan simplicity. Here you’ll find gray stone castles rather than sun-drenched villas. The people look different, too, taller and blonder than southern Italians, and with plenty of German and Central European surnames.

*

Most of the best vineyards in Friuli lie along the hilly eastern border with Slovenia, north of Gorizia, in the areas known as Collio and--to a slightly lesser extent--Colli Orientali (literally, hills and eastern hills). This is where you’ll find such well-known producers as Fiegl, Schiopetto, Russiz Superiore, Livio Felluga, Marco Felluga and Villa Russiz. The best of these wines are aromatic, elegant and relatively light in body, with a tart acidity that allows them to go well with the local cuisine, which tends much more to potatoes and pork fat than pasta and olive oil.

On Colomba’s recommendation, we stayed at the Hotel Franz in the town of Gradisca d’Isonzo. While it was farther than other hotels from most of the vineyards (though the famous Jermann winery is relatively close), it offered other pleasures--friendly hosts who were plugged into the local wine and food scene and, maybe most important in the scorching summer, effective air-conditioning.

That first evening, before heading to dinner, Kathy and I took a stroll through town to Mulin Vecio (old mill), a kind of Italian beer garden where they were slicing the biggest mortadella I have ever seen. True mortadella has been approved for importation by the United States only recently, and most Americans know it as bologna, just as we know French foie gras as canned pate. The translated version is only the palest shadow of the original. This sausage had to be a foot and a half in diameter, a pale, unctuous pinkish-gray, and liberally studded with half-inch chunks of creamy white pork fat. Oh, man.

Though dinner was less than an hour away, I couldn’t resist. And as long as I was getting mortadella, I thought I’d get some prosciutto, too. And what about speck, that delectable smoked bacon? And some of those good vinegary red peppers, sott’aceto. And a glass of Tocai Friulano, the ubiquitous local white wine. The mortadella was amazing, of an almost mousse-y fattiness. In Friuli they serve it with grated kren, or raw horseradish, which cuts the unctuousness nicely. The prosciutto was fabulous, too. Most of the hams in this area come from San Daniele del Friuli, though there are also scores of small artisanal prosciutto makers in the countryside, many of whom, in the Central European tradition, lightly smoke their hams--something not done in the rest of Italy.

At that moment, our vacation plans took an abrupt 90-degree turn. Rather than touring wineries (who wants to see a bunch of musty old barrels, anyway?), we set off in search of cold cuts. With affettati like this, why would you possibly look for anything else? While all of Italy is rich in pork products, Friuli may be especially so, given the influence of the ham- and sausage-happy cultures of Central Europe.

Our first stop was obvious: San Daniele, set just at the transition where the hills give way to mountains. It turns out that our cold-cut obsession is not uncommon. The road to San Daniele is marked with signs proclaiming “Strada dei castelli e del prosciutto” (Highway of castles and ham).

Most of the prosciutto factories are outside of town. Pork and sea salt are the only ingredients, and after they’ve been aged, they are pressed, which gives the hams their characteristic flattened shape. It also creates a ham that seems softer and moister than the more familiar prosciutto di Parma and one that has a rosier color and faintly sweet aftertaste. Size matters in prosciutto, particularly in San Daniele, which is still struggling to come out from behind the shadows of its dominant cousin (San Daniele hams have been imported into the United States since 1996; Parma hams were reintroduced in 1989 after being banned by the USDA in the 1960s after a reported outbreak of swine flu in Italy.) One way the San Danielese do that is by emphasizing the relative handmade aspect of their product. Only about 1.7 million hams are produced each year by the 26 members of the San Daniele consorzio (the marketing organization for the producers of the area), as opposed to more than 8 million in Parma.

Though tours of factories can be arranged, it’s probably beside the point for anyone but true ham-heads: The factories are antiseptic, gleaming white and industrial. Better to spend time getting to know the town. San Daniele has several good food stores where you can taste hams from various producers. Officially, all the hams are the same and labeled only San Daniele, but each ham is stamped with a number that can be traced to an individual factory, allowing real prosciutto fans to keep track. And of real prosciutto fans, there apparently is no shortage. Every August, the town celebrates the Aria di Festa, a weeklong celebration of ham that draws more than 400,000 people.

*

But how many of them get to Sauris, the next town on our cold- cuts-and-wine tour? Not many, I’ll bet. Not after the drive we had getting there. Though it’s fewer than 30 miles away as the crow flies, it turns out that a good part of the distance is on precarious, twisting two-lane mountain roads. Much of the rest is through tunnels. I swear we were in some tunnels that lasted 20 minutes. But Colomba had said that there was a very good producer of prosciutto there, someone who made only 35,000 hams a year.

The barn-like prosciutticcio of Wolf Petris--more a workshop than a factory--was closed for a holiday but just across the road was the Mueble Schneider, a bed-and-breakfast run by the same family since 1804. They were happy to supply a mid-afternoon snack of local affettati and wine. The prosciutto was only faintly smoky--someone exposed to American smoked hams might not even detect it--but very good (Petris also makes unsmoked). The peppery pancetta and tart, fatty dried salame were sweet. The best, though, was the speck, which had a satiny quality unlike any I’ve tasted.

At a nearby condominium, a hand-lettered sign advertised local honey. We knocked on the door and were greeted by a housewife who took us into her kitchen and gave us a tasting of her wares while her kids watched TV in the living room. We ended up buying an incredibly fragrant raspberry honey and an intriguingly bitter chestnut one. Then we walked back down the hill for another snack, this time sweets--apple tart and a moist almond cake. Then home. This time, we skipped dinner.

Aaaah, yes, Colomba said the next day, Wolf Petris is very good. But, dropping the ultimate tease, he said there is an even smaller producer making maybe even better prosciutto. In Cormons, Lorenzo d’Osvaldo makes only 1,500 hams a year--all from black Friulian pigs. He also makes both smoked and unsmoked hams. Unfortunately, this being August, d’Osvaldo was also on vacation. But Colomba suggested a wine tasting the next day at his friend’s enoteca near Udine. It might be interesting, he said--the final Friulian taste-off for Gambero Rosso magazine’s Tre Bichierre, Italy’s highest wine honor. There might be some things worth trying.

Of course, that was an understatement. The tasting was held at Enoteca Mauro just outside Udine. Generically, an enoteca is a wine bar, but they vary in seriousness from places where you simply quaff whatever is fresh and local to places that offer quite a bit more. Enoteca Mauro, though fairly new, has become one of the hot spots for serious wine-drinkers in the area because of proprietor Stefano Mauro’s enthusiasm for wine--and, perhaps in some cases, despite it: He’s famous for taking a half-hour to pour a glass while he tells you about the wine. Until about 20 years ago, the building was a 16th century barn on Mauro’s family farm. Mauro, who opened the enoteca in 1990, still lives on site with his young family and grows fruits and vegetables in the courtyard.

Of the 30 or so wines we tasted from Friuli and elsewhere, my favorites were Livio Felluga’s spectacular Terre Alte, an herbaceous proprietal blend of Tocai, Pinot Bianco and Sauvignon from the Colli Orientali, and Jermann’s monumental Vintage Tunina, a Sauvignon-Chardonnay blend and one of the few wines in Italy that has its own government-recognized appellation. A little winery called Miani provided some real surprises with more traditional Friulian wines--great Tocai and Sauvignon.

But for me, the real treat came at lunch. If you’re going to drink serious wines, you need serious food. At Enoteca Mauro, that meant a stupendous collection of cold cuts: rare roast beef, speck, salame, prosciutto from San Daniele and Parma. And what’s this? A delicately smoky ham from d’Osvaldo. Colomba smiled at my pleasure. But in this game of ever-increasing expectations, even that was overshadowed by a dark, incredibly silky, intensely flavorful cured meat I couldn’t identify.

“That’s goose prosciutto,” Mauro said. It turns out that in addition to pigs, there’s quite a tradition of goose-loving in Friuli. In fact, every August there is a festival of the goose in the little town of Morsano al Tagliamento, not far away.

Jolanda de Col is the best producer of goose products in the area and, Colomba told me, and if you think this goose prosciutto is good, you ought to try the goose sott’olio, preserved for a year in olive oil.

But we’re leaving in the morning, I protested. Not a problem, he told me. Let me make a phone call and you can stop by on your way out of town. You can’t leave Friuli without tasting their goose breast stuffed with foie gras.

Goose stuffed with foie gras?

Well, I told my wife when I got back to the hotel, it looks like we’re going to be staying in Friuli a little longer than we’d planned. This place is full of surprises.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Guidebook: Feasting in Friuli

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Italy is 39. Prices are computed at the rate of 2,003 lira to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only unless otherwise noted.

*

Getting there: Alitalia offers nonstop service to Milan, the most economical destination from which to reach Friuli, and Delta, American West, American, Continental and United Airlines have connecting flights. It is best to tour Friuli by car. All the major car rental agencies have offices in Milan.

*

Where to stay: Hotel Franz, Viale Trieste 45, Gradisca d’Isonzo; telephone 0481-99211, fax 0481-960-510, e-mail info@hotelfranz.et. Rates: $89 includes buffet.

Mueble Schneider, Via Roma 38, Sauris; tel. 0433-86220, fax 0433-86220. Rates: $55.

Wineries and ham makers: In and around Udine: Enoteca Stefano Mauro, Vivolo Simone 1, Cassaco; tel. 0432-880-000. Great selection of Friulian wines and cold cuts with an enthusiastic host.

Jolanda de Cole, Via Primero Maggio, 21, Palmanova; tel. 0432-920-321. Goose prosciutto from heaven, as well as other products.

Prosciuttificio-Salumificio Wolf Petris, Via Volvan 88, Sauris; tel. 0433-86054. Wonderful cold cuts in a fabulous setting.

*

In Gorizia: Enoteca Regionale del Friuli-Venezia Giulia “La Serenissina,” 2634272 Via Battisti, Gradisca d’Isonzo; tel. 0481-99528. The official enoteca of the region with many wines by the glass.

Lorenzo d’Osvaldo, Via Dante 40, Cormons; tel. 0481-61644. Very good small producer of prosciutto.

Where to eat: In and around Udine: Antica Osteria, Via Tagliamento 13, San Daniele; tel. 0432-954-909. Old-style Friulian restaurant with a fogolar (central fireplace). $100.

Da Romea, Via Divisione Julia 15, Manzano; tel. 0432-754-251. Leda della Rovere is acknowledged to be one of the best chefs in the region. $100.

La di Petros, Piazza del Tiglio, Mels; tel. 0432-889-626, fax 0432-889-626. Many regional specialties in season. Great wine list. $75, inclues wine.

In Gorizia: Locanda Ai Campi, Via Napoli 7, Monfalcone; tel. 0481-481-937. Impeccably fresh fish in an ever-changing menu. $60.

Gostilna Devetak, San Michele del Carso 48, San Michele del Carso; tel. 0481-882-2005. One of the best wine lists in Friuli.

Trattoria al Cacciatore de la Subida, Subida di Cormons Cormons; tel. 0481-60531. This and da Romea are the two best restaurants in Friuli.

Mulin Vecio, Via Gorizia 2, Monfalcone; tel. 0481-481-937. Great wine bar with local cold cuts. $70.

For more information: The Italian Tourism Board, tel. (310) 820-0098, www.italiantourism.com.tourism.com