When we moved to a little town in north-eastern Italy last summer, I found myself always looking up. My eyes were drawn to the limestone hills of the Carso, or the Adriatic cliffs towards Trieste. But when I finally looked down, I kept finding strange little ankle-high signposts. They appeared at intersections, on corners, by the side of narrow village lanes, with small ivy branches waving in the fierce bora wind, and a village name scrawled along the arrow. Then, days or weeks later – they would be gone, only to be replaced by a different post with a different name on a different corner.
What were these odd little things? We turned, as always, to Filippo, our blues musician neighbour who has the unfortunate task of translating Italy for us. (What do we do with the recycling? Where's the best cheese? ask Filippo!) "They indicate osmice. Follow the branches and they take you to farms where people sell wine and food, but only for eight days at a time."
He waxed nostalgic about childhood afternoons at osmice until I interrupted: "Let's go and see them, please."
We live in a small seaside town called Duino, known for its two castles and the rough coastal trail which inspired the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to write his Duino Elegies. It is part of the limestone plateau called the Carso (Kras in Slovene; Karst in German) stretching from south-west Slovenia. Though the pink evening light can be positively Tuscan, this part of the Friuli-Venezia-Giulia region is not the Italy of the imagination; borders shifted so often in the last century that it's sometimes hard to know exactly which country you're in here.
Under the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1918, the Karst area became a Slovene-speaking part of Italy after the first world war. The 1947 peace treaty gave most of the Karst to Yugoslavia, then, in 1954, the area around Trieste – which had been under Allied rule – became part of Italy again. This is where we live, and the history is tangible: signs in Duino are in both Italian and Slovene, and for the osmice – a Slovenian tradition in the Italian hills – the two cultures come together over wine and cheese and more wine.
The word osmica comes from the Slovene word for eight, osem. In the 18th century, Austrian empress Maria-Theresa decreed that Slovenians had eight days a year in which to sell their surplus goods. Now Carso osmice typically stay open for 10 days or longer, and may reopen later in the year.
One hot Saturday, we followed Filippo's car into the hills behind Sistiana, a cliffside town with a bumpy rocky beach. Randomly following the ivy markers, we hit a tidy farm called Le Torri di Slivia. We hunkered down at a long, shared outside table covered in a white-and-red check tablecloth. First, following tradition, we washed down a bowl of hard-boiled eggs with a jug of water. Once the jug was empty, cloudy white wine took the water's place. The kids played hide and seek and stood, mouths agape, as a farmer trained a horse on the stud farm opposite. The piatto giardinetto arrived: a platter of salami and cheese, courtesy of the animals bleating out back. Two platters of food and two jugs of wine, plus crepes, came to about €40.
One grizzled old man swayed on his seat. "Every osmica has a guy who stays too long," we were told. Joining in the region's small agriturismo boom, the brother and sister team who run the farm rent a few simple, clean rooms in a renovated hayloft, with exposed beams and en suite bathrooms.
Our friend Matej, a Triestino of Slovenian descent, pulled up in his car. "Now we go to the unbelievable osmica," he announced. We headed off in a three-car convoy, counting the ivy posts as we went. It was obvious which villages had osmice because the usually empty narrow roads were packed with cars, inventively parked. We squeaked by, not far from the trenches Ernest Hemingway wrote about in A Farewell to Arms.
In the hilltop town of Prepotto, we found an ivy branch outside two massive oak doors. There was no sign to indicate the Zidarich winery, which made the big reveal even more breathtaking: a glass and oak annex to an old farmhouse, surrounded by sloping vineyards. Through floor-to-ceiling windows, we could see the Gulf of Trieste spreading into the distance. Inside, long oak tables were filled with all types: nonne and their grandchildren, hipsters in black-rimmed glasses who had made the half-hour trip from Trieste. Outside, children played and twentysomethings drank wine and strummed guitars, singing songs in Slovene and Italian (plus a few bad Beatles covers in English).
It took Benjamin Zidarich eight years to build his wine cellar, modelled on the famous caves of the Carso. He used local stone to form the curving cellar walls that drop five floors below, room upon room lined with oak barrels from France and Slovenia.
"No chemicals, no additives, unfiltered – everything from the red soil of the Carso," he said in Italian, while poor Filippo translated.
He told us how he worked in a paper factory with his father to secure a loan to build the place: mornings in the paper factory, afternoons digging the rock. Growing grapes in the Carso is a Herculean task. The soil, said Zidarich, is just 30cm deep; planting vines meant hacking through rock with pick axes. We revelled in the result, the ancient Slovenian Vitovska wine, white and fruity. It proved a good friend to a platter of pancetta, prosciutto, cheese drizzled in oil and fennel seeds, and a basket of white fluffy bread.
This place has been in Zidarich's family for six generations. He recalled watching his grandparents sell a few bottles of their own homemade wine during osmica time when he was a kid. Are you Italian or Slovenian, I asked.
"A difficult question. We've always been here. What's changed is the name of the country. I'm an Italian citizen. Slovene is my mother tongue. It doesn't matter. The earth stays the same."
• Ryanair flies to Trieste from Stansted and Birmingham. Le Torri di Slivia (+39 338 351 5876) will be open from 14-23 May. Accommodation is available all year round; doubles €50-€60. Zidarich winery (00 39 040 201223) will be open as an osmica from 1-21 July. Wine tasting is available throughout the year. A map of osmice can be found at osmize.net/mappa. Spring/summer is the best time to find them. Local newspapers also have listings, but following the roadside posts is the best method.
