Mid-April 2026 in Belgrade marked the brief window when local asparagus actually matters. It was the 17th, and my fiancée and I were putting together a dinner of penne with roasted asparagus and chicken to mark a specific occasion: my new appointment with a Slovenian company. The geography of the wine choice was therefore mandatory; the style, however, was a calculated risk. Asparagus is notoriously hostile to most wines — its naturally occurring asparagusic acid strips fruit and heightens metallic bitterness, making standard pairings an exercise in damage control. To counter it, I pulled a clay bottle of Šuman Sun Drops 2021, banking on the idea that a full-bodied, oxidatively aged Slovenian orange wine would use its savory depth to outlast the vegetable's awkward chemistry.
Radovan and Simona Šuman run a seven-hectare estate in Štajerska — the Slovenian side of Styria, in the hills around Zavrh near Voličina. It is a region caught in a climatic crossfire: Pannonian warmth pushing in from the Hungarian plains, cooler Alpine currents from the Austrian border to the north, and a faint Mediterranean influence making its way up from the Vipava Valley. The estate sits on a mosaic of clay, sandstone, and limestone. Sun Drops comes from a single, unnamed south-facing parcel — the warmest, most sun-exposed site on the property, designed to push aromatic varieties to absolute ripeness before they even reach the cellar. The 2021 growing season in eastern Slovenia followed a familiar recent pattern: a challenging, cold spring that naturally reduced yields, followed by a long, dry summer and a pristine autumn. This allowed for extended hang times, resulting in heavily concentrated fruit with naturally retained acidity — exactly the raw material required to survive years of oxidative aging without collapsing.
The 2021 blend relies on Traminer — the local name for Gewürztraminer — and Sauvignon Blanc, co-planted and co-vinified. Traminer is a demanding grape: thick-skinned, naturally low in acidity, and prone to flabby, over-perfumed extremes if harvested too late. But those same thick, pink skins hold massive phenolic potential. When subjected to extended maceration, Traminer stops acting like a floral perfume and yields moderate tannins and warm spice. Sauvignon Blanc, conversely, provides the acidic spine and the herbal tension necessary to keep the heavier Traminer from turning sluggish.
The Šumans farm biodynamically under Demeter certification — a regime bound to lunar cycles and strict limits on interventions, avoiding even the permitted organic copper sprays where possible. Their cellar logic is equally uncompromising. Sun Drops is the deliberate, warm-parcel counterpart to their basin-grown Moon Drops, and its élevage is designed for endurance rather than early appeal: spontaneous native-yeast fermentation, roughly a month of skin maceration, and around two years in old oak casks on fine lees. It is exactly this extended contact with the skins and seeds that structurally defines it as an orange wine. Bottled unfined, unfiltered, and with zero added sulfur, the wine is protected from light strike and temperature fluctuations by its heavy, opaque clay vessel. This oxidative aging extracts every bit of savory depth, turning an aromatic grape blend into a bone-dry, full-bodied orange wine.
Sun Drops is a dense, heavily extracted argument for what Slovenian Styria can do when a producer leans fully into the heat of a south-facing parcel, the phenolic extraction of the skins, and the long wait in the cellar. It is an orange wine built on endurance and savory complexity, capable of anchoring a difficult pairing without needing heavy tannins to do the heavy lifting.
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