Modern society cannot function without time. It measures everything from 100-metre races to history. We treat it as though it were something material that we can hold, and thus live under pressure; people don’t have time to have time

In this social environment, Janez Istenič decided to produce a sparkling wine that needed to take its time. First the base wine: the vineyard must grow, the vine must mature so it bears fruit, so the grapes can be brought to the cellar and the must turn to wine, which then undergoes another fermentation in the bottle before becoming sparkling wine.

This commitment and the production of sparkling wines took up all his time, from the physical, to agrarian and urban. To this day everything takes place within an arc of time that stretches from the roots of the vine in the Bizeljsko earth to the glass of sparkling wine served in town.

The Istenič family’s production of sparkling wines broke new ground in terms of private production, since all the larger wineries were socially owned, with only one of them producing a traditional sparkling wine. We were the first private company in Slovenia and in federal Yugoslavia to produce sparkling wine using the traditional method, and we later developed a successful form of wine tourism.