A Shade of All Three

COLLISION 00005

My Slovenian road trip from Lake Bled to Vipava wine country could best be described as the most harrowing, white-knuckled drive of my entire life.  I will forever think twice before choosing the scenic route again.  For hours, I navigated the most mind-blowingly narrow roads and bridges, held my breath passing through truly blind curves and squeezed past put-out speeding semis.  

I rubbed blisters into my palms.  I cursed and I cried.

By the time I finally made it to the flatter, tamer and wider roads of the valley I had almost run out of gas, missed an opportunity to eat and taken countless, hard-to-correct wrong turns.  My gross miscalculation in driving time was about to cost me something worse – my first wine tasting in Slovenia at Lepa Vida. 

Of all the tastings I had booked, Lepa Vida was the one I was most looking forward to.  I felt drawn there.

The first time cell service permitted me to call the winery with an update, my 1pm appointment was approaching in ten minutes and I was easily still 20 minutes away.  I was pumping gas and beyond grateful to be doing just that.  The thought of keeping any guests waiting was out of the question so I told the woman on the other side of the line I’d eat the tasting fee – thinking to myself I’m not going to be the ugly American who keeps anyone waiting. 

She was polite but having none of it.   “Come,” she said, “we will wait. Take a breath and join us.” 

I pulled into the parking lot about as frazzled and pissed off at life as one could be.  Raging inside, I did my best to pull myself together before I walked into the tasting room. 

No one was angry.  No one was stressed.  They were warm and welcoming.

I took the place that had been prepared for me.  Their eye-catching lineup of wines and labels was on display just to the left of the huge floor-to-ceiling-window that framed an infinite stretch of vineyards. 

Then the storytelling began.  I felt my blood pressure drop as I let myself be swept away by story and surroundings. 

I came to learn that the labels that caught my eye were in fact abstract drawings, each concealing a female silhouette.  Each label a different color, a different female figure, a different story.  I sat straight up in my chair.  I didn’t know any of this. 

Lepa is a familiar woman’s name in Slovenia and Vida of course means life. Collectively these labels and this winery represented the thousands of Slovenian women who left their families behind to work as wet nurses in Egypt when the Suez Canal was being built.  In the decades that followed, these women who sent money back home when times were already tough, had become proud and strong symbols of independence and commitment.

My arms and neck broke out in goosebumps. 

The story landed hard, especially since it sat among other inspiring encounters of strong Slovenian women – Irena Polanec, the portrait artist whose work I purchased in a Ljubljana gallery, Anna Roš, whose three-Michelin-star Hiša Franko I’d be dining at a week later, and Sanda, a reformed corporate marketer turned jewelry artisan I met at Center Rog.  

All of this, the winery and the women’s stories that it honored, were artistic expressions of purpose and calling.   I hadn’t just been drawn to Lepa Vida to taste wine.  I had been drawn there to hear these women’s stories – to put color to the storytelling and taste that moved me. 

As hard as it had been to get there to hear any of it, I was simply meant to.  Some collisions are invitations and nudges, others drop serendipitously in front of us and still others we have to earn and fight like hell to even encounter. 

This collision at first seemed to be the latter, but when I really thought long and hard about it, I realized it was a shade of all three.