Which Slovenian wine?

I’ve got it good. I wanted to play on the Duke Ellington tune “I got it good,” but backslid to real grammar when I realized the language police – i.e. one of the many fine hobbyist grammarians that populate this land – might not get it. That’s not a barb. I hope that one day Canada can reach, say, half the level of bilingualism there is in Slovenia, that we will one day have as many little Anglophones running around able to swear in French as there are little Slovenians able to cuss in English.

But that ain’t what I was thinking about while selecting wine this morning at Mercator. I wanted a domestic red and was horrified to see that a Cabernet Sauvignon was on the bad side of five Euros. 5.91€ to be exact. That’s outrageous, that’s highway robbery, that’s all the other clichés we spout when the price of rice goes up…that’s damn near half the price of what I would pay at the LCBO in Toronto, if they stocked Quercus. In other words, it was still pretty cheap. And that’s when I realized that in these parts things aren’t too bad for me and my modest wine consumption.

And just what is the LCBO? LCBO stands for The Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the government-controlled organization that oversees sales of alcohol in that province (beer used to be at “The Brewer’s Retail,” but they simplified that to “The Beer Store” a few years ago after some confused and thirsty hockey fans couldn’t decide whether to go inside). In brass tacks terms: in Ottawa or Toronto or Niagara Falls (ON) you have to go to an LCBO shop if you want a bottle of wine or something harder.

This is also why I have it good here in Slovenia. It’s never far to the next wine shop – that is, grocery store – and as long as you spend three Euros, you can’t go wrong with Slovenian wines.

And yet in the past year I’ve read at least three irresponsible wine comments in newspaper travel sections. Each one praised the food in whatever Slovenian restaurant they supped in, then added as an afterthought, “Slovenian wine is nothing special” or “unless you pay a lot, you won’t get good Slovenian wine.” A dozen or less words to slam an entire country’s production. This sounded like bluffing to me.

It sounded like bluffing because no specifics were given. Obviously it is possible to have a bad glass of Slovenian wine (just as it’s possible to have a lousy French wine, etc.) and perhaps these travel writers did get a stinker of a cviček with their ričet. But why not tell the reader why it was “nothing special”? Was it too bitter? Too earthy? What kind was it? Was it…now, I don’t want to pry or anything…was it, um, a red, or a white?

A lot of wine writing irks by drifting into flakey abstractions. I’m not talking about the chichi terminology, which probably makes sense once you’ve figured out your tannins and your tartrates. I’m talking about the oodles of fluffy phrases – phrases like “eager to please,” “disarmingly fresh,” or “overly present” – that make it sound like they could just as easily be talking about terriers as terroir, or literature or movies for that matter.

By providing no information whatsoever, the travel writers discovering Slovenia and dissing Slovenian wine helped neither the non-expert like me (I mean, really, what kind of practical advice is “you have to spend a lot?”) nor the connoisseur who might like to find out about wines, even about which ones to avoid.

Last week I came across a good, short article in The Globe and Mail, telling us which one not to avoid. The wine reviewer gushed over a Dveri Pax Traminec 2007 and even took a few lines to present Slovenia. Here’s the leadoff:

“Had any good Slovenian wine lately? Of course not, at least not most of you. The tiny country in central Europe is hardly on the radar of most drinkers in Canada – and for good reason. We see few bottles here from that former region of what used to be Yugoslavia. Yet the country, which gained independence in 1991, enjoys a long winemaking history dating back to pre-Roman times.”

The close was clever, and a great ego-stroke for Slovenians. Praising a British Columbia dessert wine, he concluded, “It could almost be a great traminec from Slovenia.”

About the Author

JB is a human barometer. More on that probably.