Slovenia Letter: Marjan Simcic is proud of his wines, though there seems to be some question about their provenance. Standing outside his comfortable villa in the hilly country of Brda in western Slovenia, he explains the disposition of his vineyards, which, as is common enough, are a little dispersed, some being a kilometre or two down the road while others are, as he says pointing, "just down there". The thing is that "down there", at the bottom of his garden, is Italy.
It seems they don't take too much notice of borders here. With each major war the lines on the map move a little forward or back, and a few thousand farmers who were once Austrian become Italian, only to become Yugoslav a generation later.
The winemakers, however, just get on with bringing in the harvest. And yes, Italian grapes pressed on Slovenian territory do make Slovenian wine.
I am visiting this small Alpine and Adriatic republic which is just about to join the European Union as the guest of its government, winemakers and wine development board, the only lay - which is to say wholly ignorant - member of a party otherwise consisting of Irish wine experts. Our duties, over four days, will be to visit the country's three wine regions and taste and assess their finest products. (Yes, journalism is hell, but it is not all hell.)
Just down the road from Brda is Nova Gorica, where Slovenes cross easily on showing their passes to the older Italian part of their town, Gorizia, to shop, do business or go to college.
Occasionally the local young fascisti may spray-paint a car with Slovenian plates "SCHIAVA", (slave, or Slav), a nasty and of course simple-minded gesture for in this stretch of much fought-over borderland whose blood can be "ethnically pure"?
In 1917 one of the great battles of the first World War took place just north of here when the Germans and Austro-Hungarians overran the Italians at the village of Kobarid (Caporetto) on the green and beautiful Soca (Isonzo) river. The savage fighting is the background to the Hemingway novel A Farewell to Arms, much of which is set in Gorizia.
Slovenia is a small country with many neighbours: Italians, Austrians, Hungarians and Croats. Fortunately for itself it is almost ethnically homogeneous and was therefore permitted in 1991 to slip away more or less quietly, after a mere 73 years, from Yugoslavia, and thus from further entanglement in the apparently endless troubles of the Balkans, a turbulent region which, in Churchill's words, has always produced more history than it can consume.
Before that, and going back to the late eighth century, most of present-day Slovenia was part of the main western European power, the Frankish kingdom of Charlemagne, and subsequently of one of its successor states, the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg) empire. Eastern Europeans they are not.
It would be wrong to think, however, that Slovenes regard every aspect of their Yugoslav inheritance as negative. The government minister I spoke to in Ljubljana, Samuel Zbogar, seemed calmly but firmly disinclined to tinker with the country's impressive body of social and workers' rights in the interests of further smoothing the path of inward investment.
Slovenia's GDP per head is already higher than that of the EU's poorest current members, Portugal and Greece; in the next few years it will undoubtedly edge even further up the ladder. Unemployment stands at about the EU average.
Slovenes are notoriously stay-at-home. Inquiries about the prospect of them being tempted to become "welfare tourists" in Germany, Britain or Ireland are met with an indulgent smile. These people, I am told, are reluctant to leave their villages let alone their country.
One can see why. In the wine-growing area of Jeruzalem in eastern Slovenia, where, according to legend, a group of eastbound crusaders somehow got stuck, the snow on a mid-March morning is still lying on the vineyard terraces but the sun makes it pleasant to stroll about without a coat. The only sounds to be heard over the low hills dotted with small white churches are the birds twittering, a cock crowing and the train passing by down in the valley on the branch line to Murska Sobota. This is not just Jerusalem but half-way to paradise: Tuscany without the British.
My travelling companions seemed to think highly of many of the scores of local wines that were pressed upon them. Nevertheless it may be a while before the product is available in Ireland. Marketing difficulties abound, not least the Anglophone fear of strange foreign languages on wine labels, though why Primorska, Posdravje and Posavje - Slovenia's three wine regions - should be considered more difficult to pronounce than, say, Gloucester, Leicester and Kirkcudbright I do not know.
France Preseren, Slovenia's greatest poet and author of its national anthem, Zdravljica (A Toast), expressed the longing for "that bright day \ all men free/ No more shall foes, but neighbours be".
We must wait a while yet here for the sweet Slovenian wine which "makes sad eyes and hearts recover, puts fire into every vein and drowns dull care". But let us all perhaps raise a glass of something to the generous and visionary Preseren on May 1st.