Lan Kristančič is the first person in his family to have been born in Slovenia. His father, Aleš, was born in Yugoslavia; his grandfather in Italy; his great-grandfather in Austria-Hungary. It sounds like the story of a family crossing Europe, until you learn one detail: none of them ever moved. All four generations were born and raised in the same house.
The people stayed. The border moved
Today, the family estate, Movia, lies in Brda, roughly a hundred metres from Italy. About a third of its vineyards are across the border, in Collio. On the ground, the crossing is almost impossible to detect. The same close-packed hills, the same vineyards threaded between woods and cherry and apricot trees, the same layers of marl and sandstone underfoot. The political geography has changed repeatedly. The geology has not.
Now something else is changing: the generation that will shape the wines of this place. Lan is taking over from Aleš Kristančič, the man who did much to create the modern wine identity of Brda. Aleš turned away from the cooperative model, began bottling the family’s wines under their own name and took them to international markets. He embraced organic and biodynamic farming when such ideas still seemed eccentric, and made wines that could not be mistaken for any others from Goriška Brda.
Lan’s task as a young winemaker is a fascinating one: to carry his father’s revolution forward without speaking in quite the same voice. He wants to retain the wines’ depth while giving them a more contemporary expression, to keep experimenting while allowing both the terroir and his own sensibility to be heard.
One terroir, two histories
Brda means “hills” in Slovene. It is less a poetic name than an exact description of the landscape: one slope folds into the next, then rises again, the land draped like a length of emerald velvet tossed down without much care. Together with Italy’s Collio, it forms one of the world’s most unusual wine regions: a place with shared geology, climate, grape varieties, food and rural culture that a national border divided, for several decades, into two very different realities.
The same ponca runs beneath both sides: a fragile, layered formation of marl and sandstone left by an ancient shallow sea. Both grow Ribolla Gialla, known in Slovenia as Rebula, alongside Friulano, or Sauvignonasse, Malvasia Istriana, Chardonnay, Merlot and Pinot Noir. Sea air rises from the Adriatic; cooler air descends from the Alps. Food, dialects and family ties do not stop at a border marker.
Collio and Brda are one terroir with two histories. After the Second World War, the line between them became part of the Iron Curtain. On the Italian side, independent estates developed, brands took shape and exports grew. Collio gradually secured a place on the international wine map, chiefly through its white wines from Ribolla Gialla and Friulano.
Brda found itself in Yugoslavia, where production was concentrated in state cooperatives and the system favoured volume above all. It was difficult for a private grower to remain independent, and harder still to bottle wine, build a name and reach foreign markets.
The border did not change the land, but it changed what its winegrowers could do. The world came to know Collio as an established Italian region and Brda as its little-known Slovenian neighbour, though no such division existed in the soil or the culture.
When Aleš Kristančič first travelled to the United States nearly forty years ago, explaining where Slovenia was proved difficult. So he would say, “Next to Collio.” The Italian half of their shared terroir already meant something to an international audience. The Slovenian half had yet to make a name for itself.
Independence hidden beneath the hay
For the Kristančič family, the border was never an abstract line on a map. Lan’s grandfather and great-grandfather woke one day to find that it ran through their land, leaving some of their vineyards in another country. Passports were not the only things that changed. Each political regime tried, in its own way, to reshape daily life. Under Italian Fascism, Slovene was banned in schools and churches. Later, under Yugoslav socialism, the pressure took another form: independent farming was discouraged, and growers were expected to deliver their harvest to state cooperatives.
Lan’s grandfather was among the few local farmers who refused to join that system. He did not want to hand his grapes to a large cooperative concerned chiefly with quantity, and the family became something of an oddity.
Equipment for an independent estate had to be bought in neighbouring Italy. Bringing it across the border officially was either impossible or prohibitively expensive because of customs duties. So some machines and tools crossed in a cart, concealed beneath hay.
Today it sounds like an excellent family story. At the time, it was a practical necessity. To keep the estate independent, the family sometimes had to act as though the right to grow grapes and make wine were itself contraband.
The Kristančič family has lived in this house for nine generations. Movia was originally the name of the family associated with the property, but in one generation there were no sons. A Kristančič married a Movia daughter. The surname disappeared; the name remained with the house and the land.
The generation that had to make itself heard
In 1986, Aleš Kristančič returned from the army and decided to bottle all the wine the family produced. Today, estate bottled looks unremarkable on a wine label. In Brda in the mid-1980s, the decision was close to revolutionary. The estate was giving up its role as a supplier of raw material to the cooperative system and taking responsibility for everything, from vineyard to bottle, sales and its own name.
The risk was considerable. Few in the region understood the approach. But Slovenia gained independence in 1991, foreign markets opened, and Aleš began selling his wines in Italy and Austria. Movia entered the US market in 1993.
The world was not yet waiting for Slovenian wine. Aleš had to explain not only the bottle, but the existence of the country it came from.
“When you have a genuinely good wine and can look someone in the eye and explain why that border makes no sense, things become a little easier,” Lan says.
Aleš’s generation had to prove that Brda deserved to be taken seriously. His wines had to overcome prejudice against an unfamiliar region on the “wrong side” of the postwar map. Aleš responded in his own way. He turned to organic and biodynamic farming in the late 1990s, before either had entered the wine mainstream. Movia received organic certification in 2004, and Aleš joined Nicolas Joly’s Renaissance des Appellations.
The most valuable inheritance Lan received is neither Movia’s international reputation nor even its old vines. It is soil that has never known herbicides.
Young voices
Generational change is often told as a story of conflict. Young successors ease back on extraction, replace barriques with larger barrels, pick earlier and declare their parents’ work a mistake. Movia’s story is different.
Lan Kristančič has inherited a singular vision that is already fully formed. His father was one of the most radical winemakers of his generation. Puro, Lunar, organic farming, biodynamics, extended maceration: all were part of Movia long before the market grew comfortable saying natural and low intervention. Lan’s work is an evolution of that vision.
Deep, serious white wines remain central to the estate’s style, but they are gaining finesse. The structure of the reds no longer feels weighty or obscures the grape and the soil. Expressing the beauty of local varieties matters more than putting winemaking techniques on display.
Movia is not alone. Other estates in Brda are passing to a new generation too. Young winemakers are taking on family vineyards, some of which once supplied grapes for sale, and beginning to release wines of their own. They meet in local wine bars, talk about their work among the vines, share observations and search together for a new expression of the region.
“There are many young first-generation winemakers here who inherit vineyards from their grandfathers and start making their own wines,” Lan says. “This community is the most valuable thing Brda has right now.”
More than a change of personnel, this is a change in how Brda imagines its wine: every bit as serious, but more precise; just as capable of ageing, but fresher; recognisable through the voice of ponca and local varieties rather than through sheer force of style.
Eighty per cent farmer
Movia farms 26 hectares. Roughly a third is planted to Ribolla Gialla, or Rebula, and another third to Merlot. The rest is shared among Chardonnay, Malvasia Istriana, Pinot Noir and a grape the family still calls Tokaj, though the label must now say Sauvignonasse. Across the border in Collio, the same grape is known as Friulano.
Lan describes his role plainly: “We want to be 80 per cent farmers and only 20 per cent winemakers. That is the true meaning of vigneron. Quality is made in the vineyard, not in the cellar.”
To him, a vineyard is monoculture taken to its limit. A person plants a vine hoping it will remain in the same place for fifty, eighty, sometimes even a hundred years. Throughout that time, the soil must remain capable of sustaining life.
It is possible to calculate the nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium removed with a harvest and replace precisely those quantities with mineral fertiliser. But Lan does not believe a living system can be reduced to a balance of three elements.
He compares a hundred kilograms of synthetic fertiliser with a cubic metre of cow manure composted for two years. The cow ate grass that grew on a hectare of land through sunlight, water and the work of organisms in the soil. What returns to the earth in the compost is more than a set of nutrients: it is the result of an entire biological cycle, life transformed.
Behind this almost metaphysical account are tangible things: organic matter, water retention, microbial activity and the resilience of old vines. The effects reach beyond vineyard health to the structure of the wine: its acidity, energy and texture.
Here, the philosophies of the two generations meet. Aleš preserved living soils and rejected the chemically convenient path. Lan is trying to make their voice in the wine still clearer.
Movia’s defining wines
The estate’s principal white grape is Ribolla Gialla, or Rebula. Movia makes five interpretations of it, from the direct White Label, made from young vines, to more complex wines from older parcels, including Amfora, planted in 1962. For Lan, they are a way of exploring how vine age, site and vinification alter the voice of a single variety.
The most radical of the whites is Lunar. Whole bunches undergo an extended maceration in specially designed horizontal barrels, where the wine remains in contact with its lees without bâtonnage and with almost no human intervention. Yet it emerges remarkably clear and pale, retaining the salinity and gripping texture of ponca.
Equally unmistakable is Puro, a sparkling wine sold undisgorged, then opened and cleared of its lees immediately before serving. Fresh grape juice takes the place of sugar for the second fermentation, allowing fully ripe fruit to meet moderate alcohol. Behind the striking ritual lies a practical winemaking idea.
Movia’s red side finds expression in Veliko Rdeče, a long-lived, Merlot-led blend from heavy clay soils. In Lan’s interpretation it retains its depth and structure while gaining freshness, juiciness and precision.
The changes in Movia’s wines do not announce themselves loudly, but the evolution is unmistakable. That makes this moment of generational change especially compelling to watch. For nine generations, the Kristančič family has seen states change and borders move while the ponca, the vines and the family home have stayed where they were. Now Lan Kristančič carries the story forward, shaping a new chapter for Movia and a contemporary voice for Goriška Brda.
Photo Credit: Movia Winery and Anna’s personal archive
Listen to the full conversation with Lan Kristančič:
Listen: Ep. 2712 — Exploring Brda with Lan Kristančič of Movia
