More about Mitja Sirk

The wine world is prone to sentimentalizing heritage, but Mitja Sirk is doing something far more calculated in the hills of Cormons, Friuli-Venezia Giulia. While his family name is tied to the high end hospitality of their Michelin starred restaurant and hotel, La Subida, Mitja has largely ignored the distractions of the hospitality industry to fixate on a single, often misunderstood grape called Friulano. His approach is a sharp, intentional pivot away from the cluttered identity of Friulian wine. By removing any distractions he has achieved a clarity that borders on the clinical.

His education was an enviable gauntlet of industry heavyweights. After a childhood spent under the wing of Josko Gravner, making his first wine at age 11 in a gifted amphora, Mitja refused to settle for the provincialism of local enology schools. Instead, he sought out the masters of precision like Conterno, Roulot, and Dujac. These experiences were an exercise in stripping away the unnecessary. He eventually traded the romanticized grit of extended skin contact and clay vessels for the unforgiving transparency of stainless steel. In his view, there is no secret recipe, only the relentless pursuit of small, daily details that separate a good wine from a definitive one.

The region itself, a horseshoe of hills known as Collio, sits at a restless intersection of Italian, Slavic, and Austrian history. The landscape is objectively stunning, caught between the Julian Alps and the Adriatic, but its viticultural history has been a mess of identity crises. Over the decades, Friuli has tried on various masks, imitating the crispness of Germany, the oak of Burgundy, or the orange wines of Georgia. Mitja has opted out of this confusion. By focusing on the native Friulano, he is successfully attempting to produce the most honest and transparent expression of the region.

This honesty begins in the soil; the famous prehistoric formation of compacted marl and sandstone known as Ponca. This unique geology provides a structural backbone and mineral extract to the delicate Friulano fruit that it simply cannot find elsewhere. Shunning pesticides and other synthetic agricultural chemicals and hunting for old vines, some dating back to the 1960s, are two of the ways he ensures his fruit carries the full weight of the hills. By employing traditional trellising like the local cappuccino style and waiting for true physiological ripeness, he ensures the grapes are an exact reflection of the region before they ever reach the cellar.

Once there, Mitja abandons the rustic trend of skin contact for a process that is unapologetically precise. This shift highlights his remarkable talent and his pursuit of technical clarity over trendy artifice. His method involves gentle pressing and a cold soak to preserve primary aromatics, followed by fermentation in stainless steel under strict temperature control. By utilizing native yeasts and keeping the wine on fine lees with light batonnage, he navigates a technical tightrope to produce a wine of crystalline focus.

One of the best parts of our job is to get behind exceptional young winemakers and introduce their wines to you. What we see in these early vintages is a remarkable talent shunning the labels of the past generation. Mitja is making wines that are crystalline, focused, and startlingly precise. These wines are a sophisticated and delicious distillation of Friuli's terroir, suggesting that the most compelling path for a young winemaker is to look past the pressure of being different and instead focus entirely on being precise. We can’t wait to see where he goes from here, but one thing is for sure, when gen pop catches on, these will become harder to find.