Our first stop on a 10-day road trip through Slovenia was a weathered, wooden farmhouse whose owner, Aci Urbajs, called himself a farmer, a father, an artist, an anarchist and a winemaker.
“You will see, I am crazy,” he said, greeting my partner, Brandi, and me as we got out of our rented Opel.
Farmers built the house — which Mr. Urbajs now keeps as an informal guesthouse — centuries ago in eastern Slovenia on a hill called Rifnik, where today four Icelandic horses graze. Mr. Urbajs’s daughter, Tina, showed us to our timbered bedroom in the loft. Her father said not to worry about the dormice in the rafters: “They live here, so you are their guest.”
Soon, we were sitting at a table by a tiled stove in the farmhouse dining room, where lace curtains hung in the windows. Mr. Urbajs and Tina brought plates of pickled young walnuts, local cheeses and grilled vegetables from the kitchen — and opened five bottles of their wine, Organic Anarchy.
Wines here are popular for their funky, natural flavors — and no one in Slovenia makes funkier, more natural wines than Mr. Urbajs. Bottles of Organic Anarchy can fetch more than $100 in New York and Paris. “For me, it’s not wine,” Mr. Urbajs said. “It’s fermenting grapes.”
Mr. Urbajs is emblematic of Slovenia’s clout with gourmands, oenophiles and hikers. This nation of just over two million people, nestled between Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia, has developed a world-class culinary reputation while retaining a culture of small guesthouses, home cooking and family farms.
The next day, we crossed to the other side of Rifnik, where Mr. Urbajs lived, grew grapes and engraved stones with runelike cosmograms. He bounded across the hillside vineyard in shorts and tattered slippers. “If I lived on another hill, I would be completely different,” he said. “We are crazy, but this is happiness.”
Wildflowers, Songbirds and Magical Vistas
Our plan was to drive westward through the Alps and wind up on the Adriatic. Though the country is smaller than Vermont, several biomes commingle and converge here. The Alps cross over the northwestern borders with Austria and Italy, while the Dinaric mountains creep upward from the Balkans in the south. From west to east, the Mediterranean basin links up with the great steppes rolling out of Hungary. The result is what ecologists call an ecotone: a transitional area that is exceptionally rich in species.
We got a taste of that biodiversity on a trail headed toward Stol, the highest peak in the Karavanke Alps, along the northern border with Austria. The vistas were majestic, but I was focused on the wildflowers: mountain sage, oxeye daisies and perennial cornflowers with spidery blue petals. The pass from a neighboring mountain to Stol was a difficult descent through a near-vertical ravine, where pink martagon lilies hung like hats on their stems. Above the tree line, campanula and campion flowered in the cracks of boulders and yellow poppies found footholds in glacial scree.
Atop Stol, we found sheep and a view of a famous Slovenian tourist site in a distant valley: a white church on an island in the center of Lake Bled. As a chilly wind picked up, we retreated to a mountaintop hut called Presernova Koca na Stolu to drink beer and eat cabbage soup and struklji, a dumpling filled with cottage cheese and topped with fried bread crumbs. Then we fell asleep in bunk beds, listening to the wind claw the roof.
The next morning, the trail was alive with songbirds. In a dwarf pine forest, we flushed a large bird with a spotted head like a starling’s: a northern nutcracker, with a long beak for pulling pine nuts from cones. Flocks of yellow-billed choughs circled around mountain peaks like puffs of smoke.
After our hike, we drove to a village called Radovljica, where a restaurant, Hisa Linhardt, served a restorative cottage-cheese pie with leek sauce whose recipe was from a 1799 Slovenian-language cookbook.
Rain, Wine and Stories From the Past
It started to pour as we drove westward toward Lake Bohinj; our plan was to hike in the Julian Alps. But with more rain in the forecast, we decided to drive to a guesthouse recommended by friends.
The detour took us around the capital, Ljubljana, in Slovenia’s center, to a village called Dvor in the south. The Guesthouse Novak is a large chalet with a vegetable garden, a tennis court and a traditional hayrack where you can get cozy in a sleeping bag for 35 euros, or about $41, per night. We arrived as Boris Novak was setting the patio tables for lunch. “We must have a glass of wine,” he said, greeting us.
Mr. Novak’s parents opened the guesthouse in 1975, when he was teenager. “We had a good life when we were young,” he said. At the time Slovenia was part of Yugoslavia. Its communist leader, Josip Broz (known as Tito), had split with Stalin after World War II and its citizens could travel freely between Eastern and Western Europe. After Tito’s death, Yugoslavia dissolved. Slovenia was the first country to leave, in 1991 — becoming independent for the first time in 12 centuries. It joined the European Union in 2004.
Mr. Novak kept several vintages of Organic Anarchy in his cellar, known for its selection of natural Slovene wines. Such a collection would have been impossible in Yugoslav times, when every farmer sold his grapes to winemaking collectives.
Mr. Novak wasn’t sure that Slovenia was better off now. “I’m a communist and an anarchist,” he said. “But of course I run my business like a capitalist.”
Still, a McKinsey consultant would tell him to charge more than €90 for an unforgettable five-hour meal: bread and sausage, cabbage-and-herb quiche, trout soup, handmade pasta with chanterelles and peas, roast veal and sorbet.
Mr. Novak and his son Jan, in his early 30s, with tattooed forearms and Bart Simpson socks, poured wine twice as fast as they brought out plates. After innumerable glasses, we stumbled into bed, happy to have chosen a guest room rather than a sleeping bag in hay.
The Most Famous Chef in Slovenia
It was hard to think about food after that feast, but I had an appointment with the most famous chef in Slovenia. Ana Ros and her ex-husband took over his parents’ guesthouse, Hisa Franko, in 2002 and transformed it into an international food destination with three Michelin stars. Ms. Ros, a self-taught chef, is largely responsible for the country’s glowing culinary reputation.
I couldn’t afford a meal at Hisa Franko, where dinner with wine costs more than €400, but I had booked one of the restaurant’s guest rooms, and Ms. Ros invited me to join her at the bar on the morning of our arrival, when she tasted the week’s menu with her staff.
We drove a circuitous route from Guesthouse Novak to the Soca Valley and wound up back in the Julian Alps, where we stayed overnight in the village of Dreznica, whose hilltop church, set among mountains, is as scenic as the better-known church at Lake Bled.
The next morning, we pulled up to Hisa Franko.
Ms. Ros stressed the connection between her cooking and the surrounding valley, where the ice blue Soca River carves through the mountains. “From the top of that mountain, you can see everywhere our food is coming from,” she said. Indeed, everything was local except the staff, who came from Italy, the United States, Poland, Afghanistan and India.
As we spoke, Ms. Ros offered me a sample of what appeared to be a black geode, which I cracked open to find steaming white flesh. “A high-mountain potato baked in a crust of summer hay and salt with sour cream, butter and honey,” Ms. Ros said. In high summer, nearly every dish incorporated flower petals and fresh fruit, including a cappelletti stuffed with aged cow cheese and served with fig leaf oil and a slice of peach. “I love cooking with fruits in a savory way,” she said. “They are one of the forgotten elements of fine dining.”
Ms. Ros showed me her wine cellar, where she, too, kept bottles of Organic Anarchy. Her cooking was more creative than any I had tasted, though the flavor I will remember most was something that she and her team did not prepare. It was a dried pear served with granola at breakfast, and it tasted not just of fruit but cinnamon and clove. Some foods do not need a chef to elevate them. They speak for themselves.
A Dip in the Sea
We had one last thing to do. Slovenia has a sliver of rocky coastline on the Istrian Peninsula, and we wanted to end our trip by jumping into the Adriatic. So we drove south to seaside Izola, where we ate an exquisite fritto misto at a humble restaurant called Bujol. The owner, Alen Puspan, served mostly small fish like anchovies and sardines. “This is what people eat when they finish work,” he said.
After lunch, we continued to our hotel in Piran. It was crowded with families, who laid towels on the boulders and piers. Our hotel was so close to the sea that looking out the windows felt like being on a cruise ship.
We walked out onto the pier and hesitated: The water was filled with translucent nonstinging jellyfish. But we hadn’t come this far to turn around. We plunged into the cool water and swam back to the dock, with jellyfish slipping between our fingers and toes.
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