Klinec

Over the past 20 years, Aleks Klinec has quietly turned his winery into a fixed star in the wine world—without any pretension. Originally, he had planned to study art in Ljubljana, but when he had to step in at home at a young age, he changed his mind and became a winemaker instead.

The Klinec winery is located in the hills of Goriška Brda, the spectacularly beautiful Slovenian part of the Collio region. In Medana, just a few hundred meters from the Italian border, his family has been growing wine for over a hundred years.

In the last two decades, Aleks has transformed the estate into a beacon of quality and integrity—always in his quiet, grounded way. From the beginning, it was clear to him that he wanted to follow a traditional path in winemaking. That meant: no chemicals in the vineyard, spontaneous fermentation, skin contact for the white wines, long aging, and no additives in the cellar apart from a minimal amount of sulfur. It sounds like textbook natural winemaking, but in truth, it’s where tradition and avant-garde shake hands.

Aleks’s sense of tradition also includes a natural, farm-like way of life: animals are an essential part of the estate. Free-roaming pigs, donkeys, goats, ducks, chickens, and horses all cross paths—or simply enjoy life in the meadows around the farm.

The wines that come from the vineyards in Medana are now sought after all over the world. Aleks’s bottles are seen as benchmarks of Slovenian winemaking in wine bars and restaurants from Tokyo to Milan, Paris, and New York.

And deservedly so. His white wines, all with relatively short maceration periods, are impressively precise. They capture the minerality of the Ponka soil (a close relative of Opok in Styria) and are powerful, elegant, and layered.

His small selection of red wines—made from Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Cabernet Sauvignon—are equally impressive: deep, juicy, and complex. None of this is by accident. Aleks has devoted years to soil health and microbiological balance in the vineyards. Pruning is done carefully, and yields are kept low. The attention to detail in the vineyard continues in the cellar.

His wines are aged slowly and with great care in traditional local woods: the whites in used acacia and mulberry barrels, the reds in cherry wood and Slavonian oak.

Anyone lucky enough to be in the area should not miss the chance to visit the family’s fantastic weekend-only restaurant, where they serve traditional dishes—most made from their own ingredients.