Tocai No More

An interesting trip to the vineyards near Cividale on Saturday. It transpires that the famous local Tocai wine is now Tocai no more (or at least from April 1st 2007). There are 2 types of Tocai on the market at the moment – the Hungarian version - a sweet wine and the version from Friuli – AKA Tocai Fruilano. The European Union has ruled that this latter version is to lose the name Tocai from April, at which point it will become simply Friulano – from the Friuli region. Obviously this presents a marketing challenge for the producers, who historically are fiercely competitive with each other and have not been working as a region – this is now changing. In the name of research, I have been trying the Tocai before it becomes obsolete to see if it is worth drinking. So far so good – give it a try before it disappears!
The case of Tocai also highlighted another interesting point. My Italian friends struggle with their use of the letter ‘h’. A little like Cockney people, the Italians add ‘h’s where there are none, and don’t use them when they should. Which made our Tocai discussions an interesting linguistic challenge as they were angry at Hungary…
The picture was taken at the end of the day, after a lot of wine tasting, just after a rousing rendition of a Beatles medley!