feature ] THE SECOND ACT OF JERMANN [by Francesco Antonini ] In the Slovenian Brda region, the latest venture from the founder of Vintage Tunina: just a few hectares, minimal intervention in the cellar, Rebula macerated on the skins, terracotta amphorae and screw caps. And this isn t a step backwards, but a warm embrace of his family history T he wind blows in from the Vipava Valley and the climate changes suddenly: cooler, crisper, as if nature had decided to turn a page in its book with a snap. You round a bend and the landscape shifts: the soil becomes lighter, harder, almost chalky. Here the soil changes. There s no more ponca here, he says, pointing to the ground. It is one of those details that may seem trivial to those who are not winemakers, but which for Silvio Jermann marks a precise boundary. Not political, but agricultural. Not visible on maps, but decisive in the glass. We are in the Slovenian Collio, just beyond that line which for decades was a scar and not merely a border between two states, now reduced to a road sign or little more. From here, at 471 metres above sea level, the highest point in Brda, on clear days like today you can see everything: the Friuli plain, the Karst, the Gulf of Trieste with the tip of Istria. Meanwhile, the workers on the bulldozers are busy preparing the vineyard that Jermann cherishes most: Having brought the vines back to where the ponca ends, right up to the road leading to the Isonzo valley, fills me with satisfaction . 84 A brief background All right, it sounds a bit trite to put it this way, and perhaps it shouldn t be said. But the man who explains every contour of the land to us with such infectious passion, who tells us that before tasting, one should always go and see the vineyards , is a living legend in the world of wine. This brief summary of previous episodes should suffice: Silvio Jermann was born in Villanova di Farra d Isonzo into a family of farmers. Which means peasants, which means poor. At home, we could never spend money. We were afraid of everything, he recently recalled in Wine Report magazine. His father Angelo tried to steer him in other directions, but it was no use: he had already fallen in love with wine, studied oenology in San Michele all Adige and set to work on the family estate. There, he immediately had the right intuition: to move beyond the classic Tocai and ready-to-drink wines, and focus on a long-lived white capable of speaking differently to international markets: in a nutshell, Vintage Tunina, a label that has become legendary. The million bottles From big to small Silvio, a stubborn man, as he himself admits, fell out with his father in 1977 and moved to Canada, where he studied the latest trends in depth. Upon his return to Friuli in 1981, Angelo transferred the business to him, and a series of successful new wines followed: Dreams made from Chardonnay grapes, Capo Martino based on Tocai Friulano, the Ribolla Vinnae, and the Pinot Noir Red Angel. Awards increased, turnover increased, and the number of hectares increased: the Jermann winery reached a million bottles, but Silvio remembers those years above all for the pride of having restored my family s social standing . It is only after the sale to Antinori that the new project becomes possible. Here, in fact, it is a matter of clearing land and replanting, of bringing vineyards back to ancient hills, of redrawing the map of Slovenian Collio in places tied to his ancestors and that requires significant financial resources. Many friends told me: why are you doing this? he smiles. The answer lies entirely in these hills: Curiosity. Seeing what comes out of this land. The new estate is small, almost tiny compared to the past: 15,000 18,000 bottles today, perhaps double in the future, once the new vineyards come into production, potentially reaching up to 28 hectares. But it is not a question of numbers; what matters is the shift in perspective. Here, Silvio Jermann does everything himself: vineyard work, winemaking decisions, experimentation. As in the beginning. When you have a large company, everything becomes demanding and you have to delegate. Here, I don t. Here I go back to following every step. A new path However, Jermann s children do not follow in his same dream, and so in 2021, during the Covid period, Silvio changes direction. The man who invented Vintage Tunina sells a majority stake in the company to the Antinori family, one of the great names in Italian wine, retaining a minority share that still keeps him involved in decision-making. At 67, retirement age even according to the strict criteria of Italy s INPS pension system, he would certainly have every right to rest and enjoy his wellstocked farmhouse. But that is not really his style. The following year, Sylvmann d.o.o. is founded in Cu j, a Slovenian limited company that soon establishes a small warehouse converted into a winery. Starting from the 2023 harvest, it begins to put into practice a new version of Jermann. This is not an epiphany or an instinctive decision, but rather a reconnection of threads. Here in Bilijana, in the municipality of Dobrovo, my great-grandfather Anton was born, coming from a family originally from Austria s Burgenland region, Silvio explains. And in these same places, when I was a boy, my father used to take me to taste the wines made by local farmers. These memories have stayed with him over the years, so much so that as early as 2008, as soon as Slovenia joined the European Union, Jermann quickly bought his first Ribolla grape vineyards in the Brda region a grape that for years would be supplied to his winery in Friuli s Collio. Back to the future At the heart of the project lies the approach to winemaking. It s almost a return to the future, with less technology and more natural ingredients, fewer interventions in the cellar and more patience. The grapes are the region s traditional varieties: Ribolla-Rebula, Malvasia-Malvazija, and Sauvignonasse which is, in fact, the good old Tocai. In the future, the plan is to plant Pinot Noir in the highest vineyard, and this would be the only red in the range. If you don t have the ponca, the Ribolla won t develop; you end up with a wine lacking structure, explains Jermann during our slow pilgrimage through the vineyards, justifying the choice of indigenous varieties. One of the cornerstones is the maceration of the white wines. But even here there are precedents: Jermann experimented with this back in the 1990s, before it became a trend. Today, however, he is reviving it, extending it, radicalising it. Up to three months on the skins for the Ribolla, which is called Vi vik-Vi vik and offered in various 85