To be fair, our trip to Slovenia was laden with agenda and that was to discover the country’s wine!
Europe as a whole produces a lot of really great wine (even in the UK though beers, ales and spirits are more our thing) and a lot of popular countries like Italy, Spain and France get all the praise for their wine, though it’s worth noting that there’s fantastic wine outside of these countries.
As with a lot of things travel related, (as cliché as this might sound) venturing off the beaten track is often where the best travel experiences lie.
Discovering Maribor, Slovenia
On this trip, we ventured off to a country neither of us had visited before—Slovenia, in particular—the city of Maribor, Slovenia’s second largest city.
The agenda was plain and simple—we would search the width and breadth of this city (and its surrounds) for the best wines on offer. It probably comes as no surprise how much we like wine (I’m actually sipping on a glass as I write this) so this was one trip we were definitely looking forward to.
First things first though—hotel check-ins at the Hotel Habakuk where we got welcomed with glasses of bubbly and charcuterie… (Not a bad start so far… 😉)
Wine Tasting Experience
The sun was still shining, albeit about to set, so we wasted no time and piled into the waiting taxi for the first of two things for the evening—wine tasting, swiftly followed by dinner.
Wine tasting happened to be a few minutes away from the hotel at Vinag wine cellars, smack in the middle of Maribor.
Before you get to the juicy stuff though, you get to go on a little tour around the cellars.
Soon enough, you start to really appreciate how much wine history there is here! Some of it dates as far back as the 19th century…
Exploring Slovenian Vineyards
Almost forgot to add, this is actually a very ‘wallet-friendly’ place to visit too – it’s €3.50 for a tour and €5 if you want a tour and wine tasting (my educated guess is you’d go for the latter option).
With a smile on my face and a skip in my step, I happily headed off to dinner at MAK restaurant where a tasting menu was waiting with our names on it!
I’d love to tell you everything we had but our actual menu didn’t have the name of a single one of the meals. Apparently, that’s the chef’s trademark—he loves to surprise you as you eat so you know to expect quite a number of courses, but he won’t tell you quite how many in advance or what they are until the meal is sitting right in front of you.
There were interesting pieces of salmon, savory little macarons, spicy chicken, fish dishes, and even snail caviar as the night went on…
Fuelled by pizza, we moved on to a part of the day I’d been looking forward to—cycling from vineyard to vineyard in the Slovenian countryside.
And no, not because we would be cycling (I have no idea what it feels like to be excited by physical exercise), I was excited mostly about the wine but a LOT by the fact that we would be using electric bicycles to explore the countryside!
Not a bad place to ‘cycle’ through, right? (Yes, the bicycle was doing all the work but I’m gonna take all the credit).
But more on that later… 🙂
