The Wine Hills of Collio and Brda

The wine country east of Venice does not end where Italy does. Across the hills between Friuli and Slovenia, vineyards continue through a landscape with two names, two languages and much of the same ground beneath them.

For many American travelers, the idea of an Italian wine-country trip arrives with a familiar image.

There are hills, vineyard roads, cellar doors, old villages and long lunches somewhere between one tasting and the next. Tuscany has become the clearest version of that journey, so familiar that “wine country in Italy” can almost feel like shorthand for one particular landscape.

Farther northeast, the pattern changes.

Near Gorizia, vineyards begin climbing through the hills of Collio. Cross into Slovenia and they continue through Goriška Brda.

The border changes the language.

The hills do not.

One landscape, two names

Collio and Brda are not literally one wine appellation.

That distinction matters.

On the Italian side, Collio is a DOC wine region centered on the hills around Cormons, San Floriano del Collio, Dolegna and neighboring communities. Across the border, Goriška Brda has its own producers, institutions and Slovenian wine identity.

But stand in the vineyards and the separation becomes less obvious.

The slopes continue.

So do the terraces.

Villages appear on hilltops and ridges on both sides. Roads rise and fall through vineyards rather than approaching the border as though the landscape itself has changed.

The political line is real.

The agricultural geography is older.

That is the useful starting point for understanding this part of the Alpine-Adriatic.

The ground has two words too

Even the soil carries the border in its vocabulary.

In Collio, growers commonly call it ponca.

In Brda, it is opoka.

Both terms refer to the same characteristic flysch geology, layers of marl and sandstone formed from ancient marine sediments. Collio's wine consortium identifies ponca as one of the defining elements of the denomination, while Brda's tourism authority describes opoka as fundamental to the freshness and minerality associated with its wines.

The rock fractures easily.

Vines send roots through it.

Rain, slope and exposure do the rest.

This is one of those places where national borders can make a landscape sound more different than it looks.

The terminology changes within a few kilometers.

The geology does not.

White wine leads

Collio is particularly associated with white wine.

The DOC includes Friulano, Ribolla Gialla, Malvasia, Sauvignon, Pinot Grigio, Pinot Bianco, Chardonnay and several other varieties. The Collio consortium describes white grapes as the protagonists of the region, grown across roughly 1,500 hectares of vineyard.

On the Slovenian side, the names shift again.

Ribolla Gialla becomes Rebula.

It is one of the defining grapes of Brda, alongside Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon.

That linguistic change is useful.

A traveler can drink what is essentially the same historic grape on either side of the border and encounter it through two national wine cultures.

The glass makes the geography more complicated rather than less.

September is not just scenery

Vineyards are easy to romanticize when nothing much appears to be happening in them.

September corrects that.

Harvest is work.

Grapes have to be judged, cut, moved and processed at the right moment. Cellars become more active. Tractors and bins interrupt roads that might otherwise look designed purely for scenic driving.

In 2026, wineries in Friuli-Venezia Giulia are opening parts of that process to visitors through scheduled harvest experiences. In San Floriano del Collio, for example, Gradis'ciutta is offering a September 12 vendemmia morning built around grape selection, harvesting and what happens once the fruit reaches the cellar.

The experience may be bookable.

The harvest itself is not a performance.

That distinction is worth keeping.

For producers, this is the decisive part of the agricultural year.

For visitors, the vineyard becomes easier to understand once someone is actually working in it.

The border used to matter differently

Today, crossing between Collio and Brda can feel almost anticlimactic.

A road continues.

A sign changes language.

The vineyard beside it may not change at all.

That ease is relatively new.

For much of the twentieth century, the border between Italy and Yugoslavia cut through communities, farms and family connections in this landscape. Gorizia itself became one of Europe's most visible divided-border cities after the Second World War, with Nova Gorica built on the Yugoslav side.

The wine hills lived with that division too.

That history makes the present-day continuity more meaningful.

A tasting itinerary that moves from an Italian cellar to a Slovenian one is not simply a clever way to add variety to a wine trip.

It crosses a landscape that spent decades being treated as two much more separate worlds.

Cormons and Šmartno tell different stories

The towns and villages are not interchangeable.

They should not be.

On the Italian side, Cormons functions as one of Collio's natural centers, with wine bars, restaurants and producers gathering around a town that feels unmistakably Friulian.

Across the border, Šmartno sits compactly on a hill in Brda, enclosed by walls and surrounded by vineyards.

One is not the Slovenian version of the other.

That would flatten the very differences that make crossing the border worthwhile.

The better approach is to let the landscape connect them without asking the settlements themselves to match.

The vineyards provide continuity.

The towns provide contrast.

A wine trip without a single center

This is another way Collio and Brda differ from some better-known wine regions.

There is no one town that has to organize the entire journey.

Cormons is useful, as are Dobrovo and Šmartno, but no single town needs to organize the whole journey.

The experience lives largely in the movement between them: roads bending around vineyards, cellars below villages, and producers only a few kilometers apart who happen to be in different countries.

Lunch may be Italian.

Dinner may be Slovenian.

The wine between them may have more in common than the menus suggest.

That lack of a single dominant center is not an inconvenience.

It is part of what makes the region legible.

Do not rush the tastings

Wine-country travel can become strangely acquisitive.

One producer.

Then another.

Then another.

A day begins to resemble a checklist assembled around opening hours.

Collio and Brda reward a slower approach.

The landscape between tastings is not dead time. It is the subject.

Stop in a village.

Eat lunch before the next cellar.

Look at the soil if someone shows it to you.

Notice whether the wine you have just tasted appears again under another name across the border.

The goal is not to prove that you have covered both countries.

It is to understand why the countries share a wine landscape without sharing exactly the same wine culture.

The familiar wine trip, moved east

Tuscany was useful only as a starting point.

The recognizable impulse remains the same: spend a few days among vineyards, taste where the wine is made, eat well, and let the landscape organize the journey.

But Collio and Brda complicate that familiar picture.

Here, the cellar door may open in Italian or Slovenian.

Ribolla may become Rebula.

Ponca may become opoka.

A road through the vineyards may cross an international border almost without announcing it.

The names change.

The hills continue.

And in September, the grapes are coming in.