Producer Goriska Brda, Slovenia
Quercus
Quercus is the everyday range from Klet Brda, the growers' cooperative at Dobrovo in Goriška 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, whose vineyards cover more than half the vineyard area of Brda. It is the largest producer and exporter of Slovenian wine and sells into more than twenty countries. The cooperative idea runs deep here. Until after the Second World War, Brda was run on a feudal tenancy system called colonate, under which the families who farmed the vines did not own them, so a cooperative owned by those families was not a small thing.
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 and the de Baguer single-vineyard wines are the serious end, Krasno is the food range, and Quercus is the fresh, varietal, everyday tier. The whites are handled reductively with as little oxygen as possible: the must is chilled to eight degrees and settled for two days, then fermented at fourteen degrees in stainless steel in 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.
What Quercus does very well is to be reliable and good value for the quality, which is a genuinely useful thing to have on a shelf. It is also a good way into varieties people rarely meet. Pinot Bianco is one that almost nobody asks for by name, and I think that is a shame.
If you enjoy these, the cooperative's single-vineyard de Baguer wines are worth exploring next.
Winery at Dobrovo, Goriška Brda · Pinot Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot · £14.95 to £15.33 a bottle
