Hello, welcome and dobrodošli to Feel Slovenia the Podcast. In each episode, we will explore what I have called the world's best country. Meeting locals, traveling, eating, and getting to know the very best of Slovenia.  This podcast is written and hosted by me, Dr. Noah Charney, and is brought to you by the Slovenian Tourist Board. 

Dr. Noah Charney:  Happy International Women's Day! This episode stars two amazing women, who I've had the good fortune to befriend and work with for years. They have the same surname, Rebolj, but they're not related as far as they know. 

Katja Rebolj is a renowned forager who has appeared on Netflix, while Tanja Rebolj is the so-called Blonde Witch of Jezersko, who forages alpine plants within a range of one kilometre from her home and makes the most mind-blowing liquors out of them. 

Katja and Tanja are examples of kind, strong women to be celebrated. And both are connected through the Slovenian cultural tradition of foraging, herbalism, tea making and of course, making schnapps.  Raise a glass of the beverage of your choice and join us for the latest episode of Feel Slovenia.

Katja Rebolj is one of Slovenia's few full time professional foragers. She's also a scientist with a Ph. D., so she combines folk traditions with the latest scientific research. I've been going on foraging walks with her for years, often several times a year. As she is the main attraction on the Atlas Obscura tours I help with, called Forest to Table in Alpine, Slovenia. Many of the visitors who take these tours have seen her as she made an appearance on a Netflix show, Restaurants on the Edge.

Katja lives in Trzin, just north of Ljubljana, and forages for some of the capital's top chefs, as well as leading workshops and writing books. She has a soothing zen vibe about her, which makes even taking a walk in the forest with her both informative and therapeutic. 

Katja Rebolj: For me, it's kind of essential to be outside. In nature, in the forest, on the fields and in my garden. So, I really enjoy this kind of work. 

Dr. Noah Charney: Tell me a bit about how this is part of Slovenian culture. I've been struck by how often people forage around here for things like dandelion greens, mushrooms, or wild garlic. What's the culture of foraging like here in Slovenia? 

Katja Rebolj: Yes, this tradition is strong and we are very proud of this tradition, not only foraging, but also herbalism in general, in a broader sense. So, it looks like that when you will go foraging, the probability that you will meet other people, it's quite high. Yes, I meet people in the forest now when I go to pick ramsons or wild garlic, or if I go pick dandelion, I see on the fields that there are also some other people that are picking the dandelion.

Dr. Noah Charney:  What are some of the things that you make with the ingredients you forage? Are we talking about teas, soaps, tinctures? And you have some books that you wrote with recipes, right?

Katja Rebolj: So, my philosophy is that I want to use everything that is around  my house and my local environment. I pick wild plants, I pick mushrooms, and I also use the ornamental flowers, for example, or garden weeds or medicinal plants. I want to make useful products from them. A lot of what I pick I use in a daily kitchen and this is very good for the herbs that are not so strong, but some herbs I also use medicinally, so I prepare tinctures for myself or people that would ask me to, to prepare something for them. And I make, for example, vinegar infusions, or creams, or various things. But yes, my favourite thing is to use this. Everything that is around us daily in the kitchen.

Dr. Noah Charney: I asked Katja what are her favorite things to show tourists when they come. 

Katja Rebolj:  What I see as my mission to, to tell people is to present Slovenia, in particular, its biodiversity. Because biodiversity in Slovenia, it's really great. Per area, the number of plants and animal species is one of the highest in Europe. I always say we live in a true Eden garden, but then because we have so many different plants on this little area, we are also responsible to take good care of this. And I like to talk about different plants, also endangered species. Because it's important to me that with the knowledge that we have, we can do something to protect the nature, or I would say, the roller coaster that is. 

Now, turning and increasing the loss of plants and animal species more and more. So, yes, we pick different plants, not a protected one, but different plants. And we cook this traditionally based things that our grandmothers and centuries before they have cooked on this place. So, these are quite simple dishes, but still very tasty because the tastes that we get from our nature, we cannot really get them from the herbs that we buy in the store or from spices around the world. It's kind of a unique taste and the knowledge is unique. So, I like to take tourists to nature where we gather plants together and we make tasty food out of it. And that's not my fault. That's simply nature's fault. 

Dr. Noah Charney: One of the most popular souvenirs for tourists to take home is mountain tea, planinski čaj. There's no set recipe for this. But it is an assortment of alpine plants. You can buy some name brand versions in supermarkets, but it's much cooler to gather your own. What do you like to put in your mountain tea? 

Katja Rebolj: In a mountain tea, I really like a good mint. And good mint in nature, it's not very easy to find. For example, Slovenia has a very good saying. We say, a good mint we will recognize on the third nose. Now, what does that mean?  First, you macerate mint and see if it smells nice and it usually does. But later on, the smell can get kind of weird, or even better. We really like to search for the mint that smells good, even after several minutes that we have first tasted it. This is kind of an orientation for us that even if we try this mint, it will be very good even if we store it some other way, it will be very good and it will be very good in the mountain tea. 

And, I like to have some trees in the mountain tea, for example, rowan berries or blackthorn, prunus spinosa. I very much like only a few berries, but still nothing to overdo it, but still a few. And rose hip, I like because of vitamin C. Otherwise my favourite plant for the, from the mountains, I would say it's lady's mantle. So, Alchemilla vulgaris. It's a plant that also grows not only in Alps, but as ornamental plant even. And it's so good for women and it's also plant with very strong traditional use. Also, the research supports the traditional use and yes, it's a respected plant and a very, very nice plant. 

Sometimes I would pick a leaf of lady's mantle and put it into a salad or just chop it very smoothly and put it into rice or buckwheat and yes, it's a nice addition to food even though it doesn't have like uh, aromatic smell, but I like it there because it's good for me.

Alcohol, I mainly use for making tinctures that I use for the medicinal use. For example, I make tinctures from dipsacus or from ground ivy, glechoma hederacea and other plants that are usually quite strong herbs. I use them for various things, for myself, for my family, for friends, for people, people who ask me. 

I also like to try Tanja's liquors that are very good and yes, I like those special additions that are made from the most beautiful plants that grow here in Slovenia.

Dr. Noah Charney: Americans don't know about schnapps, or rather, our only association is with overly sweet cocktail mixers from the 1980s. Central Europe is schnapps heaven, with most folk drinking homemade distillations made from apples but then later flavoured with everything from Williams pear to blueberries to walnuts, sage and more.

Everyone seems to have a family member who makes their own schnapps, so village tastings are really excuses for community parties as much as local pride. In Slovenia, schnapps is like a national beverage, much as vodka is in Russia. However, making schnapps at home is also a widespread pastime. When Westerners think of homemade hard liquor, images of Prohibition era speakeasies, bathtub gin, hillbilly moonshine and beverages that taste like rubbing alcohol come to mind.

But what is amazing about the homemade Slovenian product is just how good it is. Smooth, complex and completely delicious. Sure, you can buy factory-made schnapps in supermarkets, but at least among my friends and family in law, no one does, because everyone seems to have at least one friend or relative who makes schnapps in their garage and it's usually much better than what you can buy in a store.

Schnapps is made by keeping fruit in barrels until it ferments and then boiling the resulting mash twice. Each time, catching the steam from the boiling process in a still, hence the term distilling. The distillation process purifies and liquefies the fruit mash and produces alcohol. The first distillation will transform some 80 litres of crushed, fermented fruit into 20 25 litres of liquid with about 80 percent alcohol content.

The second distillation can include flavouring, like the addition of another fruit, for example, pears. Imbuing flavour, but also bringing down the alcohol content to the desired 40 percent or so. Proper for schnapps. 

There are many varieties of schnapps. I tried a fantastic hazelnut version on a recent trip to Austria. But the Slovenian favourite is Viljamuka, flavored with Williams pear. You could, of course, make the schnapps entirely with a fruit other than apple, like those wonderful pears, but it becomes expensive to do so, and the taste doesn't seem to be that much more intense than an apple schnapps later flavoured with other fruit.

Slivovica is made with plums, and slivovica is a popular Polish variant. Schnapps can be spiked with peach, blueberry, lemon, walnut, even the medicinal brinovec, made from juniper berries and good for ales of the lower bodily portions. And they're all popular. If you've been to Croatia, you might have tried the Croatian version called rakija.

Most of Central and Eastern Europe seems to do a version of this homemade schnapps.  One of the favourites for everyone, especially my mom, is mixing apple schnapps with sugar and lemon to make limonice, a sweet sour concoction that's a cousin of the Italian limoncello. But schnapps can also be very sophisticated.

I lead some foraging and schnapps tasting tours and a highlight is our visit to Cvet Gora in Jezersko, site of Boris Johnson's honeymoon, in case you were wondering. Here, Tanja Rebolj, who calls herself the blonde witch, makes mix logical synopsis, one of which has 102 ingredients that she gathers herself, and another of which tastes like liquified apple strudel. 

Tanja Rebolj: This is the last one and this is for holidays. We make it for holidays. It's not strong and it's like liquid apple pie. Really apple pie completely. We say strudel in Slovenia, but I use baked apples, then I put in the rum, and cook it one and also spices for Christmas. 

Dr. Noah Charney: Tanja Rebolj cannot walk more than a few paces in the Alpine meadows around her home without gathering ingredients. Most of us pass over a lovely to look at tall grass dusted with bursts of colours from petals of Gentian, Plantago, Lady’s Mantle, Centarium, and more, but Tanja sees them as key components of medicinal and ridiculously delicious liquors of her own invention. So, what we walk past hardly noticing, she gathers as key ingredients.

We are in Jezersko, Slovenia, taking a walk in the woods with Tanja. 

Tanja Rebolj: For the best, we say glog (hawthorn), and we use it flower. You see this, we use for tea, and I put also in my schnapps. And this, we have also, uh, berries, red berries.  Great for when you have problems with your heart. Not love problems, but other problems. You can use it. You can buy it in Slovenia. We have it a lot.

Dr. Noah Charney: Jezersko is a village tucked high up in a mountain pass in the Kamnik Slovenia Alps range. It was the first official mountain village in Slovenia, joining a network of settlements throughout the Alps that are hubs for sustainable, environmentally friendly mountaineering and hiking. 

The village snuggled up to the border with Austria, which is just a short stroll away. began as a stopover point for furmani, the 19th century equivalent of truck drivers, who would carry cargo from point A to point B using horse drawn carriages. They would stop in Jezersko, then just a cluster of houses occupied by shepherds who kept flocks of an indigenous breed of sheep called Jezersko Solčava. 

This is where Tanja makes a myriad of liquors that are based on schnapps, fermented distilled apples, but to which she adds all sorts of ingredients, creating the most sophisticated, delicious potions you can imagine. And each one has a traditional folk medicinal component to them, remedies for what ails you.So we might even say that they are healthy-ish.  Home distilled schnapps is such an integral part of Slovenian life that it will be offered not only to guests as a welcome, but also as a cure all. Eat too much, have a schnapps. Not hungry? Have a schnapps. Is your shoe too tight? Rub it with schnapps. As an American, the only association I had was with sickly, peach flavoured cocktails that I never actually drank but saw in 1980s movies. And little did I know that the drink could be so sophisticated. 

As a child, Tanja would often visit Jezersko for mountain walks, and she wound up marrying someone born and raised here. While her mother-in-law forged to make tea, Tanja decided to make the hard stuff instead. She gathers all the ingredients herself and almost all come from within one kilometre of her home.

Tanja Rebolj: My mother knows about ten flowers. My mother-in-law knows maybe twenty of them. She was growing up here, so. She picked it for a tea, and when she died her customers wanted that somebody make her tea more, more, more, and then I decided to schnapps, since I'm better in schnapps. I don't drink it, but I produce a lot of different types. 

Dr. Noah Charney: So, how did you start teaching yourself? 

Tanja Rebolj: Just with books, because I didn't know that I can, and they were really funny situation because when I want to find some flower, I just, it was like this, you know, when you want to find something now, I want to find here and, uh, in one week.

I didn't find anything, but then I see that flowers will call me when they want to be picked up. It's maybe funny or it's strange, but there were situations that when I was driving down when I worked in Ljubljana,  I said in the morning “oh, we need this”. And I just put in my head and in one week flower called me. And then there were places that I had a feeling that I must stop and I stopped and I found it. And this was really interesting, also for me, I didn't believe that this is normal or that there are these things that they work. 

Dr. Noah Charney: Tanja's giant leap forward was to prepare elaborate recipes from schnapps based liquors. She's more mixologist than moonshine maker. Each of her over 22 and counting schnappses has a different flavour profile, is designed based on traditional home remedy medicinal uses of wild plants, roots, and herbs, and is a carefully crafted potion, layered with complexity. This is not schnapps as anyone in Slovenia knows it.

It's schnapps 2. 0. You can do a guided tasting of schnapps with Tanja if you book ahead. You can also spend the night at Cvet Gora because it has glamping. Anyone I've brought to Tanja falls in love with Jezersko, with the Schnapps, and of course with her wonderful personality. Wherever you go, when you come to Slovenia, if you have the opportunity to indulge in a local tipple, and then say cheers, raise your glass, make eye contact, and say na zdravje, awarding points to the Schnapps in question is optional.  

Hvala and thank you for listening to Feel Slovenia the Podcast.  This podcast is brought to you by the Slovenian Tourist Board and was written and presented by Dr. Noah Charney.  Please subscribe to get each new episode and tell all of your friends interested in travel and all things Slovenia.  If you'd like to learn more, visit slovenia.info. For more information, you're welcome to follow our social media channels. Feel Slovenia on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TripAdvisor.