Quercus

Quercus is the everyday range from Klet Brda, the growers' cooperative at Dobrovo in Goriska Brda, the hill country in the far west of Slovenia where the vineyards run straight into Italian Collio with very little to mark the border.

The cooperative was founded in 1957 and is still owned outright by the local growing families, around four hundred of them. Its family vineyards cover more than half the vineyard area of Brda. It is the largest producer and exporter of Slovenian wine and sells into twenty-six countries, which for a country most British drinkers could not place on a map is quite something. The cooperative idea here is older than 1957: thirty-eight tenant farmers formed the first one in Brda and bought 230 hectares from the landlord, which in a region run on a feudal tenancy system called colonate until after the Second World War was not a small act. Before that, the wine was made in the cellars of seventeen castles owned by foreign nobility.

Brda works because of two things. The soil is opoka, the marl the locals name and every grower here will talk about. The climate mixes Alpine cold air with Mediterranean warmth off the Adriatic. The vineyards are terraced on steep slopes and much of the work is done by hand; the average family holding is only a few acres. Rebula, the local white, accounts for 27 per cent of the plantings, with Merlot at 20, Chardonnay at 16 and Sauvignonasse at 12, alongside Pinot Bianco, Pinot Grigio, Sauvignon Blanc, both Cabernets, Pinot Noir, Syrah, Picolit and Verduzzo.

Klet Brda makes wine at several levels. Bagueri Superior and the de Baguer single-vineyard wines are the serious end, Krasno is the food range, and Quercus is the fresh, varietal, everyday tier: ten dry wines and a sweet Muscato-Verduzzo. The whites are handled reductively with as little oxygen as possible, the must chilled to eight degrees and settled for two days, then fermented at fourteen degrees in stainless steel in constant contact with the lees, with batonnage, and kept in steel for six months. The reds spend longer in large old oak casks. Nothing about that is designed to be complicated, and it is not meant to be.

Worth being clear about the tier. Quercus is not where Klet Brda's ambition lives. What Quercus is very good at is being reliable and inexpensive for the quality, which is a genuinely useful thing to have on a shelf. For what it is worth, the winery reported eight wines scoring above 90 points across its ranges at the 2026 Decanter World Wine Awards.

The Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot is the everyday red of the range. The Pinot Bianco is a variety almost nobody asks for by name, and I think that is a shame, so it is one worth arguing for.

If either goes well, the de Baguer wines are worth a conversation.