When wine people talk about the origin of orange wine, they talk about Friuli — the northeastern Italian region that gave the world skin-contact whites. What they mention less often is that the border between Friuli and Slovenia runs straight through the middle of the same hills, on the same soils, with the same grape varieties on both sides. Brda — the Slovenian word for hills — is geologically one region with Friuli's Collio appellation. The line between them was drawn after the Second World War, not by geology.
Slovenian winemakers were part of the skin-contact revival from the beginning. The country sits at the same latitude as Bordeaux and Piedmont, with three distinct climates — Mediterranean in the west, Alpine in the north, Pannonian in the east — and indigenous varieties that exist nowhere else. What took time was the infrastructure: decades of cooperative farming and bulk production in the Yugoslav era meant that small, artisan producers only emerged properly in the 1990s. That generation is now in its prime.
The wines are landing in important wine bars across Europe and are now getting the attention they have long deserved.
