I have never been so grateful for a sat-nav's passive-aggressive "recalculating" than I was on the road to Sacile. There I was, smugly following what I assumed was a scenic route through Friuli, when the tarmac simply gave up and turned into something resembling a ploughed field. My hire car, a Fiat 500 that had clearly never seen actual agriculture, emitted a concerning scrape as I bottomed out for the third time. The sat-nav, in what I can only describe as digital judgement, fell silent entirely. I had managed to get gloriously, magnificently lost within five miles of my destination.

This is how I found the vineyard.

It was not on any map I had consulted, which admittedly were none, given my misplaced confidence in Italian road signage. A hand-painted board reading "Vino" in wobbly letters pointed down a track I would never have noticed at speed. With nothing to lose and a growing suspicion I might need to camp in the Fiat, I followed it. The track opened onto a small clearing where an elderly man was hosing down a tractor with the kind of contentment I associate with people who have never once checked their email. He looked at me, looked at my car, and laughed. Not unkindly. The laugh of someone who has seen many city people discover that Friuli does not care about your itinerary.

His name was Elio, though I only understood this after several attempts involving pointing at myself and saying "Sarah" very slowly. He poured me a glass of something red from a plastic jug that had definitely started life containing cooking oil. It was extraordinary. Earthy and bright, nothing like the careful bottles I would later see in proper enotecas. We sat on plastic chairs and communicated in the universal language of gestures and appreciative noises. I understood approximately none of his explanation of the grapes, except that his grandfather planted them and that this seemed explanation enough.

I arrived at the Sacile property two hours late, slightly wobbly, and with three litres of Elio's wine wrapped in newspaper on my passenger seat. The key was in a lockbox, the instructions straightforward, the house itself a modest stone building with shutters that had seen better decades. I loved it immediately. There is something about arriving somewhere in a state of mild chaos that strips away any pretence. I was not a curated traveller having a curated experience. I was a woman who had got her car stuck, been rescued by kindness, and was now attempting to operate an Italian coffee maker while still slightly euphoric from unexpected hospitality.

The next morning, still jet-lagged and coffee-shaky, I set out with no particular destination. This became the pattern. Sacile itself, I discovered, has a centro storico that rewards the wanderer. I found a bakery by following my nose down an alley too narrow for the Fiat, emerging with still-warm crostoli that shattered sugar across my jacket. I found a bookshop where the owner, upon learning I was English, produced a battered copy of Dickens and insisted we discuss it despite my Italian extending barely past ordering coffee. I found a tiny park where old men played cards with the intensity of Olympic athletes, and where nobody minded when I sat for an hour simply watching.

The property became my base for deliberate disorientation. Each morning I would pick a direction, ignore the sat-nav entirely, and see what the road presented. A ruined chapel I would never have found in any guidebook, its frescoes faded to ghosts but still beautiful in their decay. A field of sunflowers that appeared around a bend like a shouted hello. A village bar where the only food was a plate of cured meats and cheese that materialised without my ordering, accompanied by the assumption that of course this is what you wanted.

There was the afternoon I followed a river path that grew progressively less path-like, until I was scrambling over rocks in sandals entirely unsuited to scrambling. I emerged scratched and triumphant at a swimming hole where local teenagers were jumping from a rope swing. They stared. I stared back. Then one of them offered me a turn, and I declined with the wisdom of someone who knows their own limitations, but I sat on the bank and watched them with something like envy for their easy belonging.

What I am trying to describe is the particular joy of not finding what you were looking for. I had planned nothing for this trip beyond the booking itself. No checklist of sights, no restaurants to tick off. This absence of intention became its own kind of intention. Getting lost stopped being accident and became practice. Each wrong turn was a small surrender, a recognition that the place knew better than I did what I might need.

On my final evening, I drove back to Elio's vineyard, though "drove" overstates the confidence with which I navigated those tracks. He was there, unsurprised. We sat again in the plastic chairs. The wine tasted the same, which is to say it tasted like that specific evening, that specific light, the particular quality of having nowhere else to be. I thought about how I had arrived furious with myself, with the sat-nav, with Italian infrastructure. How that frustration had dissolved into something else entirely, something I am still not certain I have a name for.

I left Friuli with Elio's wine finished, my car slightly more battered, and no photographs of famous landmarks. What I have instead is the memory of a hand-painted sign, a plastic jug, the sound of cards slapped onto a table, the feeling of sunflower stalks brushing my shoulders as I stood wondering where the path had gone. The sat-nav worked perfectly on the return to the airport. I found this almost disappointing. Some part of me had hoped for one final wrong turn, one more thing I had not planned and could not have imagined.