Slovenia
Three small regions, an Alpine-to-Adriatic range, and the modern revival of skin-contact white wine.
Slovenia is small enough to cross in a few hours and holds three genuinely different wine regions. Primorska, on the Italian border, is Mediterranean and continuous with Friuli's Collio; Podravje, in the north east, is cool and continental and makes aromatic whites; Posavje, in the south east, is the smallest and coolest.
The modern orange wine movement started here and in the Friulian villages immediately across the border. Producers in the Goriška Brda and Vipava valleys revived extended skin contact for white grapes, particularly rebula, in the 1990s, and the style spread from there into the international natural wine trade. That is a separate lineage from the Georgian qvevri tradition, which never stopped.
The Old Vine of Maribor is a Žametovka planted in the sixteenth century and still fruiting, recognised as the oldest living grapevine in the world. It is a tourist attraction rather than a commercial vineyard, but it is a fair emblem for a country whose vine-growing has been continuous for a very long time.
What the label says
- ZGP / PDOZaščiteno geografsko poreklo
- The protected origin tier, above the regional and table levels.
Signature grapes
our choiceKey regions
7 recordsA dashed outline is a region we describe but do not yet hold a page for.
Grapes that originate here
3 of 4Protected wine names
17 in the EU registerWorth knowing
- Rebula is the Slovenian name for ribolla gialla.
- The modern orange wine revival began in Goriška Brda and Friuli, not in Georgia.
- The Maribor Old Vine is over 400 years old and still produces fruit.
More in Europe
Sources
The description, the reading of the classification system and the choice of signature grapes are ours. Region and grape records are built from Wikidata (CC0) and Wikipedia infoboxes (CC BY-SA 4.0). American AVA boundaries come from the TTB (public domain).
- Protected names: European Commission, eAmbrosia.