Hands-on Bled Castle

While in Bled, Slovenia, you should definitely spend a couple of hours in Bled Castle. In addition to touring the museum and chapel, be sure to stop by the print shop where, with the help of a friendly, traditionally garbed printer, you can print a souvenir certificate for yourself for a small fee.

The printer leads you through selecting the paper and the details of your certificate, sets the type and shows you how to operate the printing press. It’s a lot of fun and gives you a unique souvenir of your visit. The small print shop is decorated with photos of the famous personages who have visited the castle, and it offers a few surprises.

From a visit my wife, Paula, and I made in October ’05, our favorite memory of Bled Castle is our visit to its wine shop, where a friendly gentleman in a friar’s robe assisted us in bottling our own wine.

During our visit, there were barrels of merlot for €15 ($18) a bottle and sivi pinot for €8 ($10) a bottle) available for bottling. With a lot of guidance from the “friar,” I filled a bottle with the sivi pinot, drank the excess in the bottle, inserted and sealed the cork and then completed a rustic, souvenir informational certificate about the wine.

The wines we tasted were excellent, especially the sivi pinot, a dry white wine widely available throughout Slovenia.

STEPHEN O. ADDISON, Jr.
Charlotte, NC