Edi Simčič, Brda

Aleks says that cellar door sales are growing since Slovenia joined the EU - before that there was a limit on what Italian or Austrian visitors could take home. One of the wines on our tasting - the Wine with no Name is a project that will produce a super-premium red blend. "The first icon wine of Slovenia?" I ask Aleks, who laughs: "The story starts in 1997, when we made fairly rough reds so we radically changed yields, vinification, and tannin management.

Marjan Simčič, Brda

The estate of Marjan Simčič is also in Brda, though Marjan and Aleks Simčič above are only very distantly related. Marjan Simčič is represented in the UK by H&H Bancroft, and his wines have appeared on these pages before with very positive comments. Like Gravner, Marjan (left) farms both sides of the border: Italy is literally a stone's throw from his winery. The international appeal of Simčič's wines is enhanced by ageing in French and Slovenian barrels. But he strikes a middle ground between an international style and something more iconoclastic: he is a passionate advocate of skin macerations of up to one year and says "The first place great wine is made is here," tapping his temple. "If the grapes are fully mature, then skin contact gives only good things. What is more interesting, eating whole, ripe grapes or sipping just the juice?"

Ščurek, Brda

Stojan Ščurek farms 17 hectares of vines and produce up to 60,000 bottles in a year, making this estate one of the region's larger independent estates. Tomaz Ščurek (left) has now joined his father in winemaking and running the business, although all of Stojan's five sons are involved. The majority of their vineyards are on the Italian side of the border, and Ščurek exports around 45% of its production, mostly to the ex-Yugoslavian states, but also across northern Europe. These are very solid, fruity, good quality commercial wines with minimal skin maceration: just six to eight hours in the press for whites, before chilling and to stainless steel for fermentation. Reds are macerated for 10 days or so for. In the cellars, classical music is played to the slumbering wines.

One interesting wine in the Ščurek portfolio is called 'UP'. The word up means 'hope' in Slovenia, but U.P. also represents the Slovenian words for 'enjoy slow' - in fact this wine was originally created for the Slow Food movement, and has now become a regular part of their production.

Movia, Brda

In Brda, the human dynamo that is Aleš Kristančič oversees one of Slovenia's most confident and ambitious estates. Movia (represented in the UK by Lea & Sandeman) is fully biodynamic, and a member of Nicolas Joly's Renaissance group. In fact, Aleš says he is the eighth generation to farm these vineyards organically, though under his direction the biodynamic approach has been embraced passionately.

Kristančič talks with infectious, sometime overwhelming enthusiasm about the quality of Slovenia's terroirs. He rejects the modern enthusiasm for clonal selection of planting material: "I may have a thousand different results in one vineyard, but that means life!" He also produces an extraordinary sparkling wine called 'Puro'. After three years in vats, the base wine is bottled with the must from the new vintage, but no sugar or yeast. The bottles are then buried in the earth for three more years, to be subjected to the earth's magnetic forces. Finally, the wine is dug-up, cleaned and labelled without being disgorged. BR>
Instead, it is sold with instructions on how to disgorge it at home (or more commonly, in a restaurant), in a tank full of water, where the yeast shoots out under pressure. The wine sounds a little crazy, but each step is designed to make the wine as natural as possible, introducing nothing that did not originate in the same vineyard.

Kristančič uses almost no sulphur in his winemaking, and utilises a lot of small barriques of French oak for varietal white wines, but larger Slovenian oak for reds. He describes his approach as a pragmatic one that tries to be as natural as possible, but not obsessively so - "foot treading of grapes may be 'natural', but its not the best. Where possible we work naturally, trying to interfere as little as possible." He takes every aspect of the operation very seriously: "It is vital that we have intellectual people involved in Movia. That includes my friends who pick the vineyards at harvest time; they must be sympathetic to the vines and understand that my courage and my vision is in the hands of their labour."

Father and son team Branko and Vasja Cotar (left) farm their vineyards in the Kras Valley, an area that enjoys a benign climate of low humidity and rainfall thanks to the rain shadow caused by surrounding mountains. This is a unique Slovenian terroir of terra rossa soils over pure limestone, just like Australia's Coonawarra. Their seven-hectare farm is two years into a three-year programme to gain organic certification, and only natural ambient yeasts are used in vinification, with a minimal of sulphur.

Cotar 's white wines are macerated for one to two weeks, and reds for at least 15 days. All are matured in older oak for two to three years. A few wines, or proportions of them, see much longer macerations. There is drip irrigation in place, but it is used only in exceptional circumstances. The photo above shows a 50-year-old Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard and the iron-rich terra rossa.

The wines of Cotar are not currently imported into the UK.