Wine Seller in a Wine Cellar
The wine seller was Davorin Mesesnel, his body shaped by lifework in the Slovenian vineyards and the heavy wine barrels he moves. The wine cellar was the basement of his house in the wine village of Goče. It had an arched brick ceiling. I was there to sample his wine.
The Cask of Amontillado by Poe came to mind, a cautionary tale for all wine lovers. Luckily, I had no beef with Davorin, and he had no beef with me, though he did have excellent homemade prosciutto and cured sausage. He served these with one of the most remarkable wines I’ve ever had, all the more so because he made it himself.
It was a wine made from picolit grapes that he’d allowed to wizen on the vine, then pressed, bottled, and aged twenty years in straw. It was viscous, tasting of honey and caramel, a serum to sip sparingly and contemplatively. Alas, he made so few bottles that he kept them for himself.
Into the Valley, the Towns, the Vineyards of Slovenia
Topside, he served some of his other wines along with a dip made from a local brined white cheese mashed with olive oil and lots of dried mint, chum that made me snap. I was thus fortified for my upcoming hike through Slovenia’s Vipava Valley — meadows, lavender fields, vineyards, bee boxes, churches, shrines, and sparsely scattered homes.
The vineyards were of two sorts, large and postage-stamp, the latter as though “here’s an empty patch of land, let’s place a vineyard on it.” In one case, a steepled church was so closely bordered by small vineyards it was hard to imagine how people made their way in. The shrines were all of the Virgin Mary, whose benevolent powers naturally extend to grapes.
Most homes were masonry, some stone, as is typical in Slovenia, with red ceramic-shingled roofs covered in rocks to hold them down so sharp winds from the Eastern Alps don’t scale them like fish. But there were a few wooden homes that looked like they belonged in an illustrated fairytale, a witch stepping outside with cake to lure passing children.
The air smelled of dirt after rain, and my heart rose. Birds warbled. Lambs, surely placed there by central casting, frolicked. Church bells cheerily rang.
Drinking in Slovenia
I stopped at a vinous waystation, provisioned by winery Vino Marc with charcuterie (housemade, of course), sharp local cheeses, and an eponymous wine from a grape I’d never heard of before, Pinela, which comes from the valley I was trekking.
It was fruity, not cloying, a note of citrus, lightly mineral, and intensely flowered as though filtered through jasmine. Like an alternative form of water, it was drinkable to slake thirst, maybe the one wine I’d have in my refrigerator if one was all I was allowed.
They also served a drink ubiquitous in Slovenia, Elderflower water, sweetened water with elderflower blossoms pulled from the elder tree (which are everywhere, I was told), allowed to soak, and strained. It was delightful, like drinking flower petals themselves.
That evening, I stayed at the Malovščevo Tourist Farm. My room was austere, almost penitential, but charming nonetheless, as though the stern hoteliers in their innocence disregarded interior decoration. It had two twin beds, perfect for pilgrims on a holy quest. I felt an impulse to kneel over my bed to do Vespers.
Time to Go Truffling
Next morning, after a trencherman’s breakfast (their eggs’ orange yolks rivaled dawn), I went truffling in an oak forest with Erik. Overcharged with joie de vivre, he rolled, he nuzzled, he scampered, he yipped, and occasionally he’d dig up a truffle (I did mention he was a Labrador Retriever, yes?).
His handler, Matjaz Beznik (founder of Mati-Truffle), grabbed it (a Tuber aestivum, summer truffle) quickly before Erik could eat it, earth’s most precious dog biscuit. And then, onward to Gric, with one Michelin star, in the town of Šentjošt nad Horjulom, to truffle-lunch.
Eating at Gric
Along with seraphic food, Gric’s steering stars are sustainability and decency. Their basement consists of drying rooms for beef (just from dairy cows that have lived out their full lifespans), venison, and housemade prosciuttos and hocks. The rooms are lined in Himalayan salt, where they reduce the water weight of some ingredients by up to 40 percent, thus concentrating their flavors.
There are also drying rooms for bonito and marlin. Wasting no part of the fish, they dry bonito hearts into powder and put it on pasta. They have a drying room just for sausages, including trout salami. They have seven gardens, one just for wasabi (devilishly difficult to grow).
They have a separate duck farm, which allows the ducks a complete lifespan, three years, not the typical ten weeks of standard duck farms, thus increasing their production costs to such a degree that they lose money on each duck dish they sell. They make their own kimchi, soy sauce, miso (more than twenty types), sriracha, and kombucha (from raspberries and shiso leaf).
The Michelin Meal Begins
The meal started upright with what I mistook for cherries, but quickly discerned were small spheres of truffled duck foie gras with mint for stems, alongside onion marmalade. There were large chunks of unreasonably delicious pickled wild mushroom to spear. Housemade charcuterie included lardo flecked with Szechuan peppercorn.
We sat, and the meal’s main engines ignited. It included a combobulation of black trumpet mushroom cream, semi-dried beets, beet juice, violets, sour cherries, deep fried quinoa (for delectable crunch), a toupée of bitter dandelion greens, all of it infused with truffle.
Another course was dairy-cow filet mignon, topped with seared radicchio, and, of course, truffles (as powerful as the winter whites I’ve dug in Oregon), in beef jus with fig vinegar. These dishes were both unexpected and inevitable.
We ended with truffle ice cream with tarragon cream, fig-leaf oil, and fresh black Périgord truffles that made me gaze heavenward. And to think 34 years earlier, under Communist rule, there were few restaurants of any sort in Slovenia.
More than 22 wine grapes are grown in Slovenia, most hardly known elsewhere. One I first had at Gric was Malvasija, not to be confused with Italian Malvasia. A flowery white wine with notes of stone fruit, it would make not only a fine table wine, but a lyrical aperitif.
Luka Košir is the chef at Gric. Nejc Farčnik is sommelier. The two learned their note-perfect English from American cartoons (more pedagogical than Sesame Street) as children. Most Slovenians are multilingual and their restaurant high-end kitchens are too, borrowing from all the countries nearby, including Italy, Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, and Austria, and utilizing French technique many have learned at Michelins abroad.
More Gastronomic Artistry
Ksenija Mahorcic is co-owner and head chef of Gostilna Mahorcic, a Michelin Bib Gourmand (not as lofty a rating as I think she deserves). She is not only a self-taught chef but a ceramicist who makes most of her restaurant’s elegant tableware. (I took a ceramics workshop from her which confirmed this should not be my career path.)
Her cuisine shows the same inventiveness as Gric and her food is no less delicious. There is an exquisite visual artistry to it that makes it stand out as distinctively hers.
A number of her dishes had delicate, edible crowns that she bakes on runneled silicone mats. One of her desserts included passion fruit mousse, crunchy hazelnut crumbs, tarragon ice cream (revelatory), and elderflower pollen, to make a foodie speak in tongues.
Eating Slovenia
At rustic Figovec in Ljubljana, Slovenia’s capital, I ate a dish of housemade truffled penne served al dente, not easy to do with fresh pasta. In fact, I’d had this dish before in Motovun, Croatia’s truffle town (also on the Istrian Peninsula), and this was just as primally comforting. Horseradish and cabbage were prominent in many of their dishes, as they were elsewhere.
I visited other polyglot restaurants and a food-forward olive farm and fish farm, all far surpassing the common lot. All had prices substantially less than you’d find for comparable food in the United States.
For all the intensivity of the restaurants I visited, their ambience was warm and relaxed.
Slovenia was once Roman. It has been part of Italy, part of Austria, part of Yugoslavia. It was once Communist. It’s now a parliamentary democracy.
Having passed through this historical wringer seems to have gentled it and possibly accounts for an electronic sign I saw overarching a highway, “Slovenia is not big. What’s the hurry?”
Notwithstanding this, were I you, I’d hurry up to visit and eat.
The Slovenia Tourist Board hosted the author.
Top Photo © Urban Soban
You can see my articles at http://www.ardentgourmet.com/published-magazine-articles
If You Go
- Fly into Ljubljana (pronounce each “j” as an “ee”), capital of Slovenia. However, it may be considerably less expensive if you fly into Zagreb, Croatia or Venice, Italy (as I did) and take a shuttle over. In Ljubljana, I stayed in the buff Occidental Hotel, near the Ljubljanica River, the central market, and took the funicular to must-visit Ljubljana Castle.
- Much more information is available at the Slovenia Tourist Board.
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