On Thursday the 20th of November and on Friday the 21st, the 17th edition of the Slovenian Wine Festival took place at the Unon Grand Hotel in Ljubljiana, as well as the 7th edition of the Culinary Festival.
We visited it on Friday afternoon.
Operations at the registration desk were fast and we quickly got our glass and could immediately start tasting.
Winemakers’ stands were placed in three different halls: Velika unionska dvorana, the largest on the ground floor; Steklena dvorana and Bela dvorana, smaller, on the first floor.
Exhibitors came from all the three Slovenian wine regions (Podravje, Posavje and Primorska), and there also were some winemakers from the Republic of Macedonia, as well as a couple of local importer of Spanish, French and Australian wines.
We were there to taste Slovenian wines and get in touch with some new cellar, in order to include it in our guides, so we regrettably couldn’t stop to taste wine from western Europe and Oceania, but Macedonian wine were too intriguing not to be tasted, and we found out that there are skilled winemakers on the southern side of the Balkan Mountains, too.
We discovered a surprising wine, Temjanika, a very intresting variety of Muscat blanc, which is mainly cultivated in Macedonia and Serbia.
Our favourite (although we admit we might be forgetting something after so many tastings) were
1. Merlot Brjac 2006 (Kmetija Zanut)
2. Pullus Renski rizling 2009 (Ptujska klet)
3. Laski rizling 2013 (Vino Valdhuber)
A lot of visitors came to this 17th edition fo Slovenian Wine Festival, especially after 6 p.m., but, despite this, there still was enough room to walk through the cellars’ stands, and the location was always quiet enough to allow us to have some small chats with winemakers.
The organisation was very accurate, as a small bottle of mineral water and a new clean glass were constanlty and easily available almost everywhere.
The only thing we found out coud be improved was just the event’s website, especially its English version, which lacked of some pieces of news until the beginning of the Festival.
… But the Festival itself surely worths the effort to look for information about it.