Fedora Wines
Dolanci, Slovenia (Vipava Valley)
The Kobal family planted their first vines above the village of Dolanci in 1880, in the Branica — the hills where the Vipava Valley climbs up to meet the Karst. Their pranono (Primorska dialect for great-grandfather) made thirty thousand liters a year and shipped it to the taverns of Trieste and Ljubljana; the farm worked its vineyards with horses until 1983 and ran an osmica — the pop-up farm tavern of the borderlands — until the Second World War. Then nationalization came, private sales ended, and for decades the grapes went quietly to the state cooperative.
In 2014, Valter and Mojca Kobal came home from Ljubljana and ended that chapter: they left the cooperative and started bottling under their own name. Fedora — the hat — now farms 35,000 vines organically, with much of the work devoted to rescuing steep old vineyard sites abandoned over the last fifty years. The soil is opoka, ancient marine flysch flecked with fossil imprints, cooled by the constant crossfire of Karst and Vipava winds.
It's a house of indigenous grapes: Zelen, Pinela, Rebula, Vitovska, Malvazija, Refošk, even rare Pokalca (Schioppettino). In the cellar, less is more — native yeasts, open vats, big old oak, no filtration, bottling by the moon. The showpiece Pinela 365 spends a full year on its skins.
IMPORTED SELECTIONS
Bastardo
Goli Breg Red
Pinela 365
Rebula