Goriška Brda (The Wine Hills)

Goriška Brda is one of Slovenia's most beautiful and least-known wine regions — a compact landscape of rolling limestone hills along the Italian border where the Collio Goriziano DOC wine region on the Italian side meets the Slovenian Brda designation, and where the distinction between Slovenian and Italian culture becomes delightfully blurred. The region produces some of the finest white wines in the Eastern Alps, particularly Rebula (Ribolla Gialla in Italian) — an ancient grape variety whose yellow-skinned, amber-tinted wines have become internationally celebrated in recent years through the natural wine movement. A drive through Goriška Brda is simultaneously a wine pilgrimage, a landscape tour, and a cultural immersion in a corner of Central Europe where Habsburg, Italian, and Slavic traditions have mixed for centuries.

The hill towns of the Brda are extraordinary in their preservation: Šmartno, the most visited, is a completely intact medieval village enclosed by its original walls and towers, with a Romanesque church and stone houses that have not changed in character for 500 years. The village is tiny — a few dozen houses — but its integrity is almost unnerving in how completely it has avoided modernisation. From the Gonjače viewing tower (a short drive up from the Brda roads), the panorama extends from the Julian Alps to the north, across the Goriška plain to the Adriatic, and west into the Italian Collio — a view of extraordinary breadth and variety on a clear day.

The cherry orchards of the Brda are one of the region's defining seasonal spectacles: in late April and early May, the hillsides turn white with blossom, and the annual Cherry Festival (Češnjin festival) in Dobrovo draws visitors from across Slovenia and Italy. Later in spring, the cherries ripen into an early harvest and roadside stalls sell them by the kilogram. The vineyards, which cover every south-facing slope, produce their harvest in September and October when the Brda takes on a warm amber and gold character that justifies every Tuscany comparison made about the region.

For a VW T3, Goriška Brda is entirely manageable territory despite the narrow, winding nature of its roads — the hills are gentle, the gradients modest, and the surfaces generally good. The main challenge is the width of the roads through the hill villages, which can make passing other vehicles tight. The reward is a completely unhurried, sun-drenched landscape that invites the kind of spontaneous stopping — at a family winery, at a roadside cherry stall, at a hilltop viewpoint — that defines slow travel at its best.