What are your guests most surprised by? <\/strong><\/p> Well, it goes without saying that there are so many great winemakers and so much great wine here, that you really have to mess up to choose something bad. So everyone assumes the wine is great. I think what they\u2019re most surprised by is the food pairing with the wine, and the food itself. I mean Slovene wines aren\u2019t so common in the US, but they\u2019re still a lot easier to get there than Slovene food. <\/p> And what do they like the most? <\/strong><\/p> People are amazed that you can spend two or three hours or sometimes a whole day with the winemaker. And it\u2019s the actual winemaker himself, not just some employee. A lot of my guests from Australia and the States and they\u2019re used to going on wine tours, but in Napa Valley you\u2019d never meet the winemakers, let alone get invited into their house or cellar or for a personal tour of their vineyards. In Slovenia you really get this very personal connection, which people love. <\/p> Where do you take guests on your tours? <\/strong><\/p> Well, I\u2019m biased, so I spend most of my time in Primorska; there are a lot of attractions nearby, and Istria is also close. If you can go to two countries in a week it\u2019s great. So most of the time I\u2019ve been doing these tours I would\u2019ve said that Brda is tops for everything. But recently I think Vipava has really caught up or even surpassed them in terms of wines. Brda is still special and the landscape is maybe more picturesque, but in Vipava there are so many good wineries now. <\/p> And what does a typical day of wine tasting entail? <\/strong><\/p> My guests like the fact that you don\u2019t need to go to five wineries in a day, you can just go to two. If you do more than three it\u2019s probably not going to work, because you always end up spending more time and tasting more wines. They tell you five and then it\u2019s eight or nine, and then they\u2019re like \u2018Oh, do you wanna try this?\u2019 and \u2018Oh, I got this special thing you have to try!\u2019. <\/p> Has anything changed in the last five or six years? <\/strong><\/p> There are a lot more wineries that have regular fixed working hours, although it\u2019s still not a majority. And a lot more are focused on wine tourism, in terms of what they\u2019re offering, how they\u2019re promoting themselves. Certainly, there are a lot more dining options.<\/p> How do you choose which winemakers to visit? <\/strong><\/p> A lot of the ones I visit now I first discovered when I was starting out, and they also got great feedback from my guests, so those ones have kind of become the bedrock of my tours. How do you find new destinations? I\u2019m always looking for new places. I think it\u2019s really hard to not get good wine, so at the end of the day I don\u2019t make my decisions based just on the wine. The main thing is really the story. What\u2019s your story? Do you have an interesting tasting room or something kind of different? And also the food, and then of course the availability. <\/p> What makes a good story? <\/strong><\/p> A lot just depends on the person, how open they are. It\u2019s not always about the wine. Some winemakers will tell you about the business side of things, which I find fascinating. I once had a guest who after two hours of talking to the winemaker was interested in investing in the winery. Sometimes people have a story that actually sounds like a movie or something. And you\u2019re like, \u2018Shit, I wouldn\u2019t believe that if it wasn\u2019t a true. Wow, that\u2019s kind of crazy.\u2019 So that definitely makes a good story.<\/p>