At a Wine Tasting in Slovenia

(the best wine tasting I’ve ever done!)

After a few epic days, hiking, white water rafting, lake hopping, and waterfall chasing in the Triglav National park, we decided we wanted to see a totally different side of Slovenia. We hit the road, and drove down south, to wine country! Wine country? In Slovenia? “But I’ve never had a Slovenian wine,” you’re thinking. I know! Me neither! Turns out, they make wine, and the grapes are grown on beautiful rolling hills, very Tuscan-esque. We arrived in Dobrovo, an incredibly quaint little village, and home to the largest winery in Slovenia, Klet Brda. We quickly found it, and parked the van in front – it’s time for a wine tasting!

Inside, we went to the little shop and asked about the wine tasting. The young lady, Nina, who worked there was so nice. She explained that the tasting is self led and costs €12, and that people often stay for an hour or hour and a half! We followed her into the tasting room. In the banquet room next door, through a temporary wall, we could hear the chatter of some kind of party. Nina gave us a bit of an overview of the winery and its history, and handed us the tasting notes for each wine. “All ten wines are for sale in the store,” she said. Wait a minute. Ten wines? She smiled and left the room. We found ourselves in the tasting room, on our own, just Michael, me, and ten wines to taste. Ohhhh dear.

The sparkling wines…

We started with the two sparkling wines, served straight out of the bottle. We sat near the big, picture windows, and looked out over the rolling Slovenian hills. Gosh, this countryside is stunning, and so, SO different than the mountainous, rocky, and extreme Triglav National Park from where we just came. As we tasted the sparkling wines, the party in the banquet room next door, sang a Slovenian drinking song! We joined them in raising our glasses and cheers’d each other.

The whites…

We moved onto the whites, the six whites (!), that were served from a machine. Each bottle was connected to two buttons with an icon next to each button — one was a half full wine glass, and one was a full wine glass. Guess which button we chose. We pressed the button once, twice, three times. We read the tasting notes of each wine, and half pretended to follow along. I have never been that good at tasting the notes and nuances in a wine, and today was no different. Sure, after I read notes that the wine smells like kiwis and tastes like wood, the wine smells and tastes just so, but until I read it, it really just smells and tastes like wine. Every time an employee walked through the room, we stuck our noses deep into the glasses and made something up about tannins, the subtleties, and the tones.

The reds…

By the time we moved onto the reds, again served in bottles, we were happily pouring very healthy portions. The first red was delicious, and I opted for a second ‘taste’ before moving onto the last wine. Surely, we thought, those who spend an hour and a half in a tasting room must be crazy people, but, there we were, two and a half hours later, stumbling into the wine shop. We paid for our wine tasting, and bought a few big bottles of our favourite wines. As we left the winery, we knew that after a wine tasting like that, neither of us could drive. The responsible thing to do would be to wait, and so we went for a hilarious, drunken stumble around the vineyards.

We arrived back to the van after an hour or so. There was a big, flat parking lot across the road, and it looked like a decent place to sleep. So, because neither of us was fit to drive, we pushed the van across the road into our perfect little parking spot. The beauty of having your bed with you at all times is that after having way too much wine, you can just fall right into it. Thanks for the epic wine tasting, Slovenia!