Wine History of Brda

Key eras

Iron Age vines at Golo Brdo

Klet Brda's own chronology opens with a grape pip found at Golo Brdo and dated to the later Iron Age, around 300 BC, which it reads as evidence that the vine was already widespread in these hills before the Romans arrived.

Roman amphorae at Neblo

A villa rustica at Neblo made the amphorae that carried wine and olive oil out of Brda under Rome. Vines were trained up fruit trees rather than on posts, and Klet Brda records that this way of growing lasted here until the end of the 19th century.

Medana enters the written record, 610

Klinec dates the first written mention of Medana, then Villa de Mandan, to 610. The family reads the village's winegrowing back further still, to the Greek colonies on this coast and then to the Romans who supplied the surrounding towns from these slopes.

Rebula named at Višnjevik, 1336

The first mention of Rebula in Brda is a sale contract drawn up in the village of Višnjevik in 1336. Višnjevik still calls itself the birthplace of the grape and holds the region's Rebula and olive oil festival every spring.

Kolonat and the castle cellars

A tenancy system called kolonat held here from the Middle Ages into the second half of the 20th century. Farmers worked small plots and owed a large share of every crop, and the wine itself was made in the cellars of seventeen castles owned by foreign nobility.

The Jesuit Jordanum at Medana

A Jesuit house at Medana ran a wine college called the Jordanum and passed its technique to the growers of the village. It worked until 1773, when the order was dissolved, and Klinec still credits it with raising the standard of Medana's wine.

Habsburg classification puts Medana first

Under Maria Theresa and Joseph II the vineyard areas of the Habsburg monarchy were classified for the first time. The County of Gorizia was sorted into nine quality categories village by village, and Medana was placed in the first of them.

Phylloxera clears the hills, 1870

Phylloxera destroyed almost all of Brda's vineyards from 1870. Everything replanted afterwards went onto grafted rootstock, and the same louse is why Rebula fell back across the border in Friuli, where French varieties took the replanted ground.

De Baguer plants without trees, 1881

Silverio de Baguer, the Catalan count who was the last owner of Dobrovo Castle, planted the first Brda vineyard without tree supports in 1881. In 1894 he wrote a chronology setting out in detail how wine was made here, and Klet Brda still names a cellar line after him.

Cherries paid before wine did

Turizem Brda records cherries carried out in baskets and on carts to imperial Vienna and eaten by the well off in St Petersburg and Prague, with a postal service laid on to keep them fresh. For a Brda family they were the income that arrived after a long winter.

Thirty-eight koloni buy the land, 1922

Thirty-eight koloni founded the first cooperative in Brda in 1922 and bought 230 hectares of land from their feudal landlord. It is the point at which the people who worked the terraces began to own them.

The border cuts the hills in two

One range of hills became two countries. Most of the Gorizia Hills went to Yugoslavia and a strip stayed Italian, so today around 60 percent of the territory and 80 percent of the people sit in the Slovenian Municipality of Brda and the rest in the province of Gorizia.

The Dobrovo cellar, 1955 to 1957

Zadružno vinarstvo Brda started building a new cellar at Dobrovo in 1955 and the modern building took its first crop in 1957. It is the cellar that still stands on Zadružna cesta and the reason Dobrovo became the working centre of the region.

Sparkling Rebula, 1962

Vinska klet Goriška Brda made its first Peneča rebula in 1962, putting the local grape into bubbles decades before the fashion. Traditional method sparkling is now a speciality of several Brda houses as well as the cooperative.

The 15 million kilogram harvest, 1979

The cooperative records 1979 as its biggest crop, 15 million kilograms of grapes. Volume on that scale was the Yugoslav-era model, and the shift away from it after 1991 is what turned Brda towards bottled wine and export markets.

The export turn, 1984 to 2002

Klet Brda dates its first shipment to the United States to 1984, a change of production style and a turn to export to 1991, and more than a million bottles on world markets plus a dedicated export warehouse to 2002. Its wines now reach 28 countries.

Long maceration becomes a house style

Extended skin contact here is routine rather than an experiment. Klinec ferments spontaneously for five to thirty days and then matures two to three years on lees in acacia, mulberry, wild cherry and oak. Kabaj at Šlovrenc leaves its whites between seven and sixty days on skins.

Rebula comes back into the ground

Turizem Brda describes Rebula as once neglected and now in demand again. The house at Dobrovo that is today Medot was the home of the oenologist Zvonimir Simčič, who ran the cooperative cellar and pushed the grape back into the region's plantings.

The DNA answer on Rebula, 2007

DNA work published in 2007 and 2008 ruled out the old account that Rebula reached these hills from Greece as Robola, and pointed instead at the Collio and Gorizia Hills themselves. Most of the world's plantings of the grape are in Slovenia.

Nova Gorica and Gorizia, 2025

Nova Gorica and Gorizia held the European Capital of Culture title together in 2025 under the banner of a borderless culture, the two halves of a town that the same post-war line had split. Brda sits inside that cross-border area and several of its cellars farm on both sides.

Influences

• Opoka marl and Eocene flysch: Klinec traces the ground to a sea that laid down thick beds of marl and sandstone, and to the Eocene flysch left behind when the water pulled back. The rock breaks down fast at the surface into mineral-rich soil and holds moisture underneath, which is why the slopes were cut into terraces centuries ago to stop them washing away.
• Assilina Medanica, the fossil under the vines: The flysch is full of marine fossils, among them a sea snail named Assilina Medanica after the village of Medana. It is the plainest evidence that these vineyards sit on an old seabed rather than on alpine rock, and growers reach for it when they explain the salinity they look for in the wines.
• Alpine and Mediterranean air together: Klinec counts about 2,900 hours of sun a year on the Medana slopes. The Adriatic is close enough to push warm air inland and the Julian Alps block the colder mountain air behind, which is the combination Brda growers credit for ripening fruit while the acidity holds.
• Collio, across the line: The Italian half of the same hills is the Collio Goriziano DOC, fourth by planted area among the DOCs of Friuli Venezia Giulia, with more than 85 percent of its output in white grapes. Several Brda estates farm parcels that cross the border, and a few may use the Collio name on the label.
• Olives back after the frost: Olive growing was knocked flat at the start of the 20th century by a long frost and has been rebuilt since. Turizem Brda counts more than 40,000 trees on the terraces today, with briška drobnica, črnica, leccino and belica among the varieties, hand-picked and cold-pressed straight after harvest.
• Three hundred families on two or three hectares: Klet Brda counts 300 winegrowing families behind its wines, each working on average only two or three hectares, with cherries and olives planted alongside the vines. On terraces this steep the work is done by hand, which is the practical reason Brda is a region of very small holdings.

Signature innovations

• Vines trained up fruit trees, the Roman-era method that survived in Brda until the end of the 19th century
• Grafting onto resistant rootstock after phylloxera cleared the vineyards from 1870
• Silverio de Baguer's 1881 planting without tree supports, the first free-standing vineyard in Brda
• The 1922 cooperative, thirty-eight koloni buying 230 hectares out of the hands of their landlord
• Peneča rebula, traditional method sparkling from the local grape, first made by the Dobrovo cellar in 1962
• Extended skin maceration on white grapes, from five days at Klinec to sixty at Kabaj
• Ageing in acacia, mulberry and wild cherry barrels alongside oak, and bottling unfiltered at very low sulphur
• Single-vineyard bottlings named after the opoka marl the vines sit on, as in Marjan Simčič's Opoka range