Kuster is very much a family affair. Beginning in 1993, Vinko and Sonja Šerbinek decided to shift from growing apples, pears and grapes to focus on bottling their first wines. Today son, Ziga, has joined the team establishing the sixth generation of vignerons in the family. Their brand name is taken from the name of the old farm house where their family has lived for 250 years. 

Like many neighbors in their 800+ year old village of Plac (south of Svecina), they grow fruits, vegetables, and a couple of pigs and cows for their own consumption each year. Every family in the village has their own recipe for preserving sausage and hams they make. They also produce quite tasty, high quality grapeseed oil (with ultra-high 800 degree burn point) that takes 10 kg of seeds to make 1 litre of oil (making it necessarily expensive to sell).

Kuster’s wine style is generally fruity, fullish bodied, and finishes dryish. The use of inoculated yeasts emphasizes aromas and the wines do have a New World fresh-fruit feel to them. All wines rest on lees six months and then bottled to pick up an added complexity. Kuster appear to experiment a lot, but not to the point of manipulating or distorting the end result of what they grow in their vineyards. A lot of wine quality is clearly due to hard work put in ripening grapes to optimum levels. The fact they achieve this at 12-12.5% levels of alcohol is very much to their credit. 

Most of their wine is sold from their cellar door with only about 5% exported to restaurants in Austria. Anyone who visits for a bottle or two will be rewarded with genuine experience of a lifestyle that has existed in their village for a long, long time. 

View Kuster wine notes here