La Ponca Pairs Ribolla Gialla With Venison at Tivoli for Autumn

La Ponca, a wine producer based in Dolegna del Collio in northeastern Italy, said Thursday that it is launching a new autumn pairing built around its 2022 Ribolla Gialla and a venison dish served at Tivoli, the one-Michelin-starred restaurant in Cortina d’Ampezzo led by chef Graziano Prest.

The pairing brings together a white wine from the Collio area of Friuli-Venezia Giulia and “Passeggiata nel bosco,” one of Prest’s signature dishes at the restaurant in the Dolomites. According to the company and the restaurant, the dish features venison fillet, Cortina puccia and yogurt mayonnaise, and was selected to match the wine’s mix of acidity, body and savory notes.

The announcement is part of La Ponca’s seasonal promotion for the 2022 vintage of Ribolla Gialla, a grape variety long associated with Friuli and neighboring parts of Slovenia. In a statement, the producer said the wine was chosen for the Tivoli pairing because it can accompany game without overpowering it, an approach that runs against the more common assumption that venison is better matched with red wine.

Prest said the wine’s time in wood helped make it suitable for the dish. He said the oak influence adds roundness and supports the fruit profile of the variety, while the wine’s freshness and savory edge help balance the yogurt mayonnaise and keep the palate clean.

The restaurant sits at the foot of the Tofane mountains, just outside the center of Cortina d’Ampezzo, one of Italy’s best-known Alpine destinations. Tivoli has held one Michelin star and is identified with a style of cooking that draws heavily on mountain products, game, herbs and forest flavors. The restaurant said Prest’s work also reflects time spent in Venice, which brought a second influence from seafood and more classical technique.

In presenting the dish, the restaurant described “Passeggiata nel bosco,” which translates to “Walk in the Woods,” as an attempt to represent the landscape around Cortina through ingredients and texture. The venison is lightly seared, while the puccia, a local bread, is used to add crunch and spice notes. The yogurt mayonnaise is intended to bring acidity and a cooler element to the plate.

La Ponca said its 2022 Ribolla Gialla comes from the Skal vineyard, located at about 200 meters above sea level on ponca soil, a local term for the stratified marl and sandstone that is common in the Collio hills and often cited by producers as central to the area’s wines. The company said the vineyard has an east-facing exposure.

The producer said the wine was made after gentle pressing and cold static settling, followed by fermentation at controlled temperature. It then spent 15 months aging on fine lees in a combination of stainless steel, barriques and 1,000-liter oak casks. According to La Ponca, the finished wine shows straw-yellow color with green highlights and aromas of minerals, white flowers and citrus, with citrus notes carrying through on the palate.

That production profile helps explain why the wine is being positioned as a white with enough weight for a dish based on game. Ribolla Gialla is often known in export markets for high acidity and restrained aromatics, but producers in Collio have increasingly used lees aging and wood in selected bottlings to give the grape more texture and broader food-pairing use.

The pairing also reflects a wider pattern in fine dining, where chefs and sommeliers have increasingly matched fuller white wines with meats that were once automatically linked to reds. Venison, especially when served rare or lightly cooked and without heavy sauces, can work with structured whites if they have enough depth and acidity. In this case, both La Ponca and Tivoli are presenting the pairing as an exchange between the freshness of Collio and the deeper, earthier flavors associated with the Dolomites in autumn.

The release places strong emphasis on geography. La Ponca is based in Scriò, in the municipality of Dolegna del Collio in the province of Gorizia, close to Italy’s border with Slovenia. Tivoli is in Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the province of Belluno, a mountain town that remains one of the country’s most prominent luxury and winter tourism centers. By bringing the wine to Cortina, the producer is linking two regions that are both part of northeastern Italy but have distinct food and wine identities.

For Prest, the dish choice also fits the season. Venison and woodland flavors are closely tied to autumn menus in Alpine restaurants, where game, mushrooms, herbs and fermented dairy products often define the transition from summer to colder months. The use of yogurt mayonnaise rather than a heavier sauce suggests an effort to keep the dish in line with the wine’s freshness, while the bread element grounds it in local tradition.

La Ponca did not announce pricing or the length of time the pairing will remain on the menu, but it said the combination has been created for the autumn season. The company framed the project as a meeting between the Collio and the Dolomites, using the 2022 Ribolla Gialla as the connecting point between the two culinary settings.

The announcement comes at a time when wineries and high-end restaurants are relying more heavily on collaborative pairings to market both wine and cuisine to travelers and destination diners. Michelin-starred restaurants, especially in resort areas such as Cortina, are often used by producers to showcase wines in a context that can influence buyers, sommeliers and food-focused tourists. For wineries, these pairings can help position a bottle within a premium dining setting and shape how consumers think about grape varieties that may still be less familiar outside their home region.

In this case, the emphasis is not only on quality but also on repositioning. By pairing Ribolla Gialla with venison rather than fish or lighter vegetable dishes, La Ponca and Tivoli are presenting the wine as broader in range than many casual drinkers might expect. The producer’s notes on structure, oak and lees aging appear intended to support that message, while the restaurant’s description of the dish gives the pairing a clear seasonal and regional frame.

The collaboration was announced through a press release distributed by SM Studio, the media relations firm representing the producer.