Cracking Croatian Wine in Pelješac and Dubrovnik (Dalmatia)

Hello, hello, hello! I'm Matthew Horky and I'm Shirin Tan. Together we are Exotic Wine Travel. We've spent the last three years traveling around the world writing and speaking about unique and exciting wines. Our journey has taken us to both lesser-known and established wine regions. In 2016 we came to Croatia for the first time. We fell in love with the country and the wines, prompting us to write the book Cracking Croatian Wine, a visitor-friendly guide. Now we're at it again. We're going to re-tour the country and bring our book to life. We aim to take you deep into the Croatian food and wine scene. So sit back, relax, and join us as we go Cracking Croatian Wine. It's only a 15-minute ferry ride from the island of Korcula to the Pelješac Peninsula. It's a slender sliver of land jutting out into the Adriatic Sea. I have to stay vigilant with you on this road. It's crazy how many weird things there are on the road. A two-lane road runs along the spine of the peninsula. There are towering mountains, hidden coves, and steep vineyards to be seen. Most of the vineyards on the peninsula consist of Plavac Mali. It's Croatia's beloved red grape and it's known for making massive red wines with big tannins. One producer that's learned to tame these big tannins is Miloš. They produce some of the most sought-after examples of Plavac Mali in Croatia. Their top red wine, Stagnum, is a must-try for hardcore wine nerds. The tasting room is always busy and today Ivan Miloš meets up with us to taste in their vintages. As usual, all the wines show well, including a brand new unreleased white wine made from rucatac. It's perfect wine. How good is it? It's very very very good. I want it. Ivan's father Frano joins us for a few minutes before we start the vineyard tour. All the vineyards of Miloš are in the possibly steep slopes. Ivan gives us some of his time to explain Plavac Mali and their vineyard practice. My family lives in this village, actually the village of Ponica, over there for almost 500 years. My father was the first one in this area who founded a family-owned winery, one of the first in one of the first seven in Croatia. The Plavac Mali grape is a really unique grape. This is the grape which can give you the best wine or even the worst wine ever. So you need to have like, you need to plant it in just a few locations where it can really grow. It's really like a grape which can suffer a lot, but still if the conditions are not perfect for it, it will be like such a bad quality. It's a grape which is well known for the high tanning, but still if you have the tanning management, if you make it round and soft after a little bit more aging, it can be a really big classic wine. So we grow just this one location here. So the soil is very unique with lots of dolomitic limestone, lots of sandy soil. Most of the vineyards are ungrafted, it's also very interesting. We are also practicing 100% organic and also all of our wines we do completely natural style. So it means we do always nativist fermentation, we don't filter wines. So we really want to keep them as unique as they are. Our final goal is to make the wine which look really good. We are trying to make the best what we can from this area. Doing organic and natural just help us to get it to that final goal actually. So you can't use any machinery to cut a wheat to do the weed management, so you need to do it by hand. So that's very labor intensive. So we spend much more time doing the weed control than doing the harvesting and pruning all together. We wish we could stay here all day, but we have much more ground to cover. Our next stop is Makala Bora Winery in the village of Potomje. Maria Murgadic and her family produce one of the most legendary wines in Croatia, the Bora Dingac. Their humble cellar also consists of artwork by Maria's daughter. After a quick tour, we start opening bottles. The entry-level Bora Galleria is a blend of Plavac Mali, Cabernet Sauvignon and Marseille that takes Shireen by surprise. I think this wine really reflects where it comes from. It's so important when you drink it, you know where it comes from. You taste the late ripening fruit. There's no mystic at all, but there's a sense of like rusticity in it that you get. And then you smell the Plavac on the nose. You smell the warm weather and I love it. The Murgadic family make iconic wines from both Postop and Dingac. They're regarded as two of the prime vineyard sites for Plavac Mali. And Maria talks about the differences. Dingac is slope around 40 to 60 degrees to the sea and Postop is around 40 degrees. The grape is Plavac Mali, 100% in Dingac, 100% in Postop. In Dingac, we harvest 30% of dry grapes, but in Postop, it's around 15 to 20. Maria's son Boris joins us and opens the family's premium wines, including the Ben Mosh family Dingac, Mali Postop and Bora Dingac. The latter is one of the top and rarest red wines in Croatia. However, today it's the Bora sweet wine that takes Shireen by surprise. It's drier on the finish and I love it. It's not just another sweet wine. You remember this wine when you drink it. Potomje is the gateway to the vineyards of Dingac. In the past, growers had to use donkeys to take harvested grapes over the steep mountain ridge to the cooperative winery. In 1973, the cooperative paid for a tunnel making transport of the grapes easier. Passing through this one lane road gives way to spectacular scenery. Dingac is Croatia's first ever appellation. It was actually established in 1961 when Croatia was part of Yugoslavia and you can see by the steep vineyards, some of these vineyards go up to 60 degrees in incline. They rival some of the most beautiful vineyards in the entire world. In the morning, we head to Korta Katarina winery. It was started by Americans Penny and Lee Anderson who came to Dalmatia and helped displaced people during the Balkan wars. They fell in love with the area and decided to start a winery. Today, we're visiting our friend, director Ivo Cibolic. After tasting a few barrel samples, we find that Korta Katarina has prepared a tasting lunch for us. Korta Katarina produces one of the best poachups in the country and they also happen to make a sparkling poachup. It goes great with the local shellfish. I like it when you unwrap it and you know all the aromatics and gafion based. We have an ice cream cake with the croquant hazelnut, some hazelnuts, white chocolate and homemade pralines with hazelnuts. The team also opens a few older vintages of the winery's top byline, the Rubin's Private Reserve Plavac Mali, which tastes like Bordeaux on steroids. Ivo also tells us about the grand opening of the hotel, which unfortunately we're going to miss out on. I guess there's always next time. This summer, we will open a very exclusive villa that will be only for 20 people, no more, and that will be something completely different to everything else that you will find in the area. Later in the afternoon, we stop by Peninsula Wine Bar. They carry a wide selection of wines from producers on and around Pelješac. We hold this shop near and dear to our hearts. When we first started the research process for our book Cracking Croatian Wine, we stopped in here and the owners opened around 30 wines for us to taste on a whim. They carry a number of exciting wines from producers like Kriz, Saints Hills, Grgic, Rozic, Skaramuca and Milicic. It's been a long day, so we head back to our place to get some rest. Stone and Mali Stone are home to the largest fortification walls in Europe. These were once used to protect the lots of local salt production. Today, they make a popular visitor attraction in addition to the local bays, which are perfect for farming oysters and mussels. We have no time to stop though. We're heading south to the city of Dubrovnik, the pearl of the Adriatic. This well-preserved walled city is one of the sets in the popular show Game of Thrones. The city is beautiful but always crowded in the summer. Today, we're stopping at one of the city's most famous restaurants, Proto. Proto is actually standing here as a restaurant since 1886. It's one of the rare settings which is actually made to be a restaurant. This terrace where we are sitting is very exclusive. It's vast and it has a beautiful atmosphere as it's located right in the center of the old city. Well, all our ingredients are locally sourced. This is very, very important for us. We also have a supplier in the Mali Stone Bay for the famous oysters. This is a flat European oyster which is exclusively on our beautiful planet still living and being farmed only in this Mali Stone Bay, which is one hour drive from here. It's called Ostraje Dulis. Unfortunately, it died everywhere else in the Mediterranean that it was living. But somehow, as we have a very clean sea, it survived here. The restaurant also employs one of the top sommeliers in Croatia, Sinisa Lassen. He stops by and offers us some wine that he produces with some of the top winemakers throughout the country. But at Proto, it's really about the fish. The fish baked in salt, besides fish baked in oven and fish on grill, which is the most popular way, fish baked in salt crust is also very, very popular because all the juices stay within the sea. And the fish baked in oven, we have a very special oven which is Italian made. You just taste like subtle burst of flavor. It's not typical grilled fish. I mean, I get a little bit of olive, I get a little bit of dried herb taste to it too. Typically, the fish that I get from Croatia, I expect it to be really simple. Grilled, baked, some salt, pepper, olive oil. But for this, I somehow taste like patches of like olive and I don't know if it's, is it rosemary or thyme that you put in here too? Yeah, you just get like little patches of different flavor and I like that. After the fish, a little dessert and we are stuffed. Because of its natural beauty and popularity, we highly recommend visiting Dubrovnik outside of July and August. We return to Pelješac for our last visit with Karidžija. Vedran Karidžija is one of the old guards on the peninsula. He makes traditional Plavac Mali from a small garage with little to no technology. Vedran's top wines are his Dinac and Kontra bottlings, but today his Plavac Tajano is really impressing Širín. The nose is just really beautiful, vibrant grapefruit, but what's amazing is it's almost silky for, come on, for a Plavac Mali blend. After we taste the newest vintages, Vedran has a little surprise for us. This is a sweet, this sweet is from Dubrovnik Republic. He takes us back to his cellar and we open an older bottle from one of Vedran's favorite vintages. 97, my son was born in 97. Now in Zagreb, Zagreb, student in Zagreb. 2008 Karidžija Dinac is captivatingly beautiful. This is so beautiful, I start to cry when I drink it. I'm too happy. This is outstanding Plavac Mali, outstanding Dinac. This is fantastic. I cannot stop drinking this wine. The Dinac is Dinac. Karidžija only makes 15,000 bottles of wine per year, so if you see it in the shop or on the wine list, it's worth checking out. Pretty sweet man. In the next episode, we'll take you to mainland Dalmatia and introduce the Croatian wine grapes Zlatarica, Babac, Debit, Marashtina and Lasina. When in mainland Dalmatia, the unique cuisine of Neretva is a highlight that you shouldn't miss. What did you say? I'm not leaving a drop of this, I'm gonna drink it all. If you would like to learn more about Croatia and Croatian wine, keep a lookout for our next episode and check out our book Cracking Croatian Wine.