I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send me through what looked like someone's vineyard. There I was, crawling along a gravel track in my hire car, convinced I'd find the main road just round the next bend, only to end up face to face with a very unimpressed-looking donkey. Turns out the actual turning was half a mile back, marked by nothing more than a weathered stone and what I now realise was a perfectly obvious signpost. In my defence, it was late March, the light was doing that strange golden thing it does in Friuli before spring properly kicks in, and everything looked slightly unreal, like a watercolour left out in the rain.

The seasonal timing had been deliberate, if I'm honest. I'd wanted to avoid the summer crush, those weeks when the roads clog with visitors heading to the beaches east of here. March in Friuli is the forgotten month, the one the brochures skip over in their rush to sell you July. The vineyards are still bare, pruned back to gnarled fists gripping the hillsides. The cherry trees were just beginning to fuzz with the earliest white blossom, so faint you wondered if you were imagining it. There was a morning chill that never quite lifted, the kind that makes you grateful for a proper jumper and a thermos of something warm.

Finding the Biacis after my vineyard detour felt like stumbling onto a secret. The property sits among working farmland, not the manicured estate variety but the real, slightly muddy sort. The owner appeared from a barn as I crunched up the drive, wiping his hands on his trousers and squinting at me with the resigned patience of someone who has watched many visitors take the same wrong turn. His English was roughly equal to my Italian, which is to say we achieved a magnificent fluency in gestures and repeated nouns. He showed me round with the brisk efficiency of a man with actual work to do, pointing out the wood-burning stove, the covered terrace where I could sit if the weather turned, the path down toward the creek that would be pleasant enough once the ground dried out a bit.

That was the thing about being here in March. Everything carried a promise of what was coming rather than the fullness of arrival. The covered terrace, with its sturdy wooden beams, would be glorious in late May when the wisteria nearby came into its lavender cascade. Now it was simply shelter from a wind that still carried winter's memory. The creek path was genuinely squelchy, my walking boots sinking into ground too sodden to absorb another drop. I attempted it anyway on my first morning, full of that holiday optimism where you convince yourself the conditions don't matter, and returned with mud splattered to the knee and a newfound respect for the local farmers in their wellingtons.

Yet there was something quietly rewarding in this in-between season. The wood stove became the centre of everything, its crackle and pop the evening soundtrack as I sat with a glass of Friulano from a vineyard barely two miles away. The pale, mineral wine tasted of the same chalky soil I'd been squelching through. Without the summer competition for tables, I drove to a nearby osteria and was seated immediately, the proprietor seeming genuinely pleased to see someone, anyone, before the proper season began. We discussed the weather with the intensity the British usually reserve for discussing the weather, though his observations were practical, concerned with frost risk and bud break timing.

By my third morning, I'd stopped fighting the season and started working with it. Early walks when the mist still pooled in the valleys, back for coffee and a slow breakfast. Afternoons reading by the stove while clouds did theatrical things across the sky. The Biacis wasn't trying to be a summer holiday in March, and my mistake had been briefly expecting it to. It was offering something else entirely: the particular peace of a place waiting, like the land around it, for its proper moment to arrive. I left with cherry blossom just beginning to dust the car windscreen, already plotting a return, though perhaps with a better Sat Nav and definitely with better boots.