Brda’s Top Ten Orange Wines

Conclusions from the Brda orange wine guide with tasting notes for wines 27-52

Ten days ago, four of us blind tasted 52 orange wines from Goriška Brda in Slovenia. You can read our thoughts and conclusions below, plus a list of the ten wines that we collectively enjoyed the most, and our individual favourites. And of course there are individual tasting notes for every bottle.

Check out the first part of this guide for my introduction, taster’s biographies and notes on the first 26 wines.

Conclusions

This was a fascinating tasting showcasing the huge diversity of oranges being made in Brda today. The region’s macerated wines have a reputation for being structured and substantial, even a touch heavy and unapproachable. But growers have long since moved on from this no-holds-barred style. Many of the varietal wines in this guide show lightness of touch, freshness and fruit. Only the blends and the more mature Rebulas tended towards the heavier style that was common a decade or two ago.

Orange wine in many parts of the world is inextricably linked to the radical end of the natural wine scene. Expectations are that it will be ‘funky’, obviously cloudy, downright weird or even confrontational. This isn’t the case in Brda. Here in this land of maceration orange wines are often quite classical, sometimes even unashamedly mainstream. There are a handful of growers who are more uncompromising – they inlcude Klinec, Nando and Kmetija Štekar. I personally love their output, but this blind tasting showed that these wines are not for everyone.

David Lipovšek was disappointed with the quality of the Friulano¹ in general, but says “the majority of the Rebulas were very well produced.” He admits that he’s not a fan of what he terms “the baby orange style”, in other words wines with just a couple of days skin contact that don’t have much perceptible structure or colour.

Simona Česen was similarly impressed with the Rebula wines, especially the more youthful examples – “they were definitely the most consistent, all really pleasant and delicious.” She also found lots to love when it came to the blends, but struggled with some of the aged Rebulas which she experienced as a bit confrontational.

Valentin Bufolin has written a blog post about the tasting here. Here’s a bit of his conclusion:

I had been disappointed many times with amber wines that can express high volatile acidity, oxidation, and general unclean characteristics. However, this time I was positively surprised, as the overall quality of the wines was excellent. Having such a large number of amber wines affirmed the importance of this category for Brda.

The top 10 wines

These wines received the highest average score across all four of us. Let’s say they’re the bottles with the most universal appeal, since they resonated with all of our differing palates. I eliminated multiple wines from the same producer².