Simon di Brazzan

The Simon di Brazzan story began in 1913 in Brazzano di Cormons, a small hamlet straddling the border of the Collio and Isonzo zones of Friuli Venezia Giulia. The estate was founded by a widow, aided by a villager named Simon, whose name still graces the wine labels to this day — a quiet tribute to the man who helped a family keep its land. Five generations later, that same land is still worked by the family he helped establish

What began as a typical mixed farm, with dairy cattle and pigs alongside the vines, was transformed by Enrico Veliscig, who shifted the estate’s focus toward pure viticulture and organic farming, tending the vines himself well past the age of 100. In 2006, his grandson Daniele Drius took over and immediately banned all chemical intervention in the vineyards, committing the estate to natural, biodynamic practices and to bottling the family’s own wine rather than selling it in bulk.

Today the estate spans roughly fourteen and a half hectares stretched across Dolegna, Cormons, Brazzano, and Mariano, mostly at the foot of the hills, on a patchwork of terroirs — stony clay, heavier clay, alluvial soil, and pure clay depending on the plot. Farming follows organic and biodynamic principles, a deliberate return to the rhythms of nature that the family sees as the truest expression of its native grape varieties — Friulano, Malvasia, Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc among them, each grown to speak plainly of this small corner of Friuli.

In the cellar, adjacent to the family home and largely unchanged from generations past, grapes arrive in small bins as quickly as possible after picking — often within forty minutes of being hand-harvested. There, among the barrels, roughly 80,000 bottles are born each year, wines defined less by technique than by patience, place, and a family that has never stopped tending this ground by hand.