Brda Orange Wine Guide

Introduction and tasting notes for wines 1-26, tasted blind by our panel

Welcome to TMC’s third wine guide, where we review 52 orange wines from 18 growers. The topic is close to my heart: I’ve been visiting Goriška Brda (aka the Slovenian Collio) regularly over the last 12 years. This region is Europe’s beating heart of orange, and that’s why you’ll find so much space devoted to it in my book Amber Revolution.

Perhaps that seems odd when you consider that so many of the pioneers and iconic estates - Gravner, Radikon, Dario Prinčič, Damijan Podversič or Paolo Vodopivec for example - are situated in Italy. But take another look at those names. Do they look Italian to you?

These families are all culturally Slovenian, and Slovenian is the language spoken around the kitchen table. Collio and Brda were one region, until two world wars resulted in the nonsensical border that now snakes through the hills. The same goes for Karst and Carso. Even today, many estates featured here have border-straddling vineyards or wineries.

TMC’s first wine guide in 2025 covered orange wines from the Italian Collio. The hook was that all these wines might qualify for the forthcoming DOC Collio classification, expected to be finalised later this year. But it felt very artificial to exclude wines made just over the border.

So this guide is the companion piece. As you can see from the map below, the Slovenian part of the region is a bit larger than the Italian part (which is the crescent shape that surrounds Brda). It’s a tumble of steep hills and dramatic vineyard terraces, and the typical opoka (decomposed marl and flysch) soil also found over the border.

As explained in last week’s newsletter, this guide has a special twist: I visited every single participating winery over the last three weeks, and personally collected all the samples.

Every wine in this guide complied with this standard:

• Hand harvested grapes

• Organic or biodynamic farming, either certified or practising¹

• Spontaneous fermentation, with no must additions or corrections (no chaptalisation, no acidification, no added tannins, yeasts or enzymes)

• Partly or wholly skin fermented. Skin contact length varies from one day to one year, but was mostly between 7-30 days

• Unfiltered and unfined

• Maximum total sulphites in the finished wine of 50mg/L²

• Vintages currently available for retail (or about to go on the market)

All wines were tasted blind on June 3rd, in Slovenia.

This guide is split into two parts:

Part 1 (here)

• Introduction

• Our tasters

• Wines 1-26 from Anže, Atelier Kramar, Blažič, Emeran Reya, Erzetič, Ferdinand, Hisa Štekar and Kabaj

Part 2 (available 13 June)

• Conclusions and personal favourites from all our tasters

• Top 10 wines from the tasting

• Wines 27-52 from Klinec, Kmetija Štekar, Kristian Keber, Marjan Simčič, Movia, Murenc, Nando, Reia, Ščurek, UOU

Availability of some of the wines in this tasting is patchy. Where I list an EU supplier, they will normally ship to any EU country. For the US, I’ve tried to find suppliers who ship to multiple states. Contact the winery or use wine-searcher.com to track down the wines in your part of the world.

Our Tasters

Valentin Bufolin won the Best Sommelier of Slovenia award in 2022. He’s worked for major wine retailers, and is currently Chief Commercial Officer of Drinx, a Slovenian drinks distributor.

Simona Česen is one of Slovenia’s top sommeliers, currently director of the wine programme at Šuklje in Ljubljana.

David Lipovšek runs Vinoteka Brda (a wine bar and shop) in the beautiful hilltop village of Šmartno, where many of the wines we review are available for purchase.

Simon J Woolf is the editor of this site. He quite likes the odd glass of orange wine.

Symbols used in the guide

⚘ Certified biodynamic (Demeter)

🌿 Certified organic

🏆 our top ten wines

🫰 Excellent value (not necessarily cheap, but above-average price/quality ratio)

❤️ One of our taster’s personal favourites

0️⃣ No added sulphites

Winemakers and Wines