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Sweet Garnatxa in the sun, waiting for deliciousness to happen to it.

Cantallops, Spain. The name for English speakers might sound like, "cantaloupes", but it couldn't be further from that in meaning. If you take it at face value, in Catalan it means, "singing at wolves". But it appears if you dig a bit deeper that the name has an old Latin root to it that means something more along the line of "wolves' rock" which makes much more sense given that the town is built on a massive rock outcropping and they had a big problem with wolves up until the 19th century.     Probably the best thing about this small hamlet sitting on the edge of Pyrenees is that they have two (count 'em) two wineries. One is Masia Serra, which it seems only has its information on the Empordà wines website. It's a gorgeous place, but not often open, which makes it hard to judge the wines as getting a tasting is tricky.     The other winery is Vinyes dels Aspres. Now, this is a winery that we actually encountered back in 2007 at a Spanish wine show in San Francisco. I can't say enough good things about this winery. For starters, the owner, David Molas Albertí is a very enthusiastic guy. He's restarted his family's winery after decades of their not producing wine. With the exception of picking the grape harvest, he does everything himself. He bottles, ages, and sells about 40,000 bottles of wine a year.     With all this exuberance, he is producing some incredibly top quality wines. This is the only winery I've ever found a White Garnatxa. The red version is everywhere in Catalonia, but no one seems to want to make a white wine of it, possibly due to price disparity with the red fetching more than the white. This is a serious error as in white form it is simply unlike any white that I've ever tasted before. Minerally yes, but with a strong, succulent body and light sweetness to it, that makes it great for both white and red drinkers alike. At €12, it's more expensive than the vast majority of wines in the area, but oh, oh so worth it.     There is also a young wine that he makes, which was unfortunately a 2008. I say unfortunately because he says (and I completely agree) that it shouldn't have been released so early. He did so because he sold out of the 2007 long before the holiday season as it was his most reasonable wine at €5.50. Just like in the rest of the world, there is economic crisis in Spain as well and his distributors pushed him in to releasing the 2008 before it was really ready. The problem this caused was that the nose is quite off and needs another three months or more in the bottle to develop. The body however is luscious and smooth, which makes the clumsy nose even more of a shame as many folks might be easily put off by that alone, when it is and will be a great wine.     The other standouts for me were the S'Alou, which is a high-end red made primarily of Garnatxa. It's a hearty, complex red. There is a lot of strawberry in the nose once it opens up properly and the oak in the body is subtle without really being overpowering, yet at the same time strong enough to be appreciated. At €23, it's getting rather pricey for the region, but is a wine that is very much worth every euro.     But the #1 wine that David is producing is the Bac de les Ginesteres. It's a sweet wine make from the raisin grapes late in the harvest. If left to age normally, these Garnatxa raisins would produce a sweet wine just like the lower cost Negre de Panses. But, to punch it up another notch, David places the wine in large, clear glass bottles that he then ages them in the sun of all things. I thought they were a joke when I saw what you see at the top of the article, sitting outside the winery, but no, they were the newest release of the wine aging. Again, at €30, it's a decently high priced sweet wine, but it is transcendent. I have gotten a new appreciation of dessert wines in successive trips to Spain, but this wine, this creation is so above and beyond and Moscatell and Garnatxa sweets that I've had before. The wine is nutty in the glass and like the best sweet Sherries that I've ever had. It ceases to be like a normal sweet wine and reaches some other level that I don't even know what to call it. All I can say is wow. Of course with only 500 bottles a year being produced, it is not easy to come by.     If the wines didn't speak enough for the winery, David is doing other things to make it stand out. For one, there is the website which is a really nicely done site. He understands marketing, which, while something that California vintners know very well, is not something that European winemakers do that much of. He also sources all of his grapes from his own lands. He doesn't buy any grapes from outside growers, which is nearly unheard of due to it limiting your production volume. And of the grapes the he grows, Garnatxa is predominant. Every wine that he produces has Garnatxa in it. He does this because it is a local varietal and he feels a good deal of pride in growing it. He doesn't grow anything like Cabernet Sauvignon or Chardonnay because they aren't local. David wants to be a Catalan winemaker first and foremost and in this he is doing exceeding well. If Cantallops doesn't know it now, he will be their star citizen in the coming years which will replace the current star, who was a farmer that shot six wolves in one year back in 1868. I'm joking,although it might not be far from the truth...

One of the many architectural beauties in Dubrovnik.

Old Dubrovnik (or "Ragusa" as it was called in the Medieval ages) is a wonderful town for the history buff, who can wander for hours with a guidebook looking at buildings, and the amateur photographer, who can capture the details of atmosphere and architecture without regard for the madding crowds.     We arrive early to roam atop the fortification walls (admission $10/person), which only those in relatively good stair-climbing shape should attempt, sunscreen in hand. We make more than half the three-hour circuit on the wide and undulating brick path, enjoying views of aquamarine sea and cannon portals on the outside (Bokar Bastion and Lovrijenac Fortress shown below) and time-worn lanes on the inside. Then we climb down to have a cappuccino and toast, and read the Herald Tribune.     For lunch, we meet Vido B. and his wife. Vido is a former machinery engineer in long-distance shipping—once the major industry in these parts—and now a politician. He tells us a bit about the life, how it stopped being much fun because improvements in the speed of loading and offloading meant you wouldn’t be spending more than eight hours or so in any port, and the industrial ports were far from their cities. He drives us back across the Tudmana bridge and down to the bayside, to a small restaurant hidden below the road at water’s edge. We can see black sea urchins among the stones in the clear water from our table. Vido orders an excellent pošip—Krajancic’s “Intrada,” possibly the best pošip we’ve had—and eat very good quality marinated anchovies, fish carpaccio, pickled tiny shrimp… Then we have a risotto duo, one with shrimp and a rustic variation with squid ink, and move into the sunshine for a dessert of crepes with burnt-orange caramel.     Back at the hotel, we again take the bus to the old city and visit the excellent wine shop next to the Arsenal Taverna, which carries many hard-to-find Croatian wines, as well as jars of marvelous fig preserves with various flavorings such as orange and cocoa. Vido has recommended a restaurant for dinner, and after wandering the back streets for a while, seeing what we see, we settle ourselves on the lovely rooftop terrace of the seafood restaurant Proto. I order a glass of Grk, a white grape from Korcula which is medium full-bodied and floral, and we have a Greek salad that turns out to be excellent, along with a plate of assorted seafood: cured salmon, a carpaccio of a white-fleshed fish, and pickled shrimp. It occurs to us that any of the coastal white wines we have had—from malvasia in Istria south to even the workhorse marastina grape in the Pelješac—would pair brilliantly with this seafood. Then we share shrimp in a red sauce atop polenta, and a Dubrovnik-style panna cotta for dessert. This is probably the most expensive restaurant we’ve been to on this trip, but the service is excellent and the fish ultrafresh, and we linger, watching swallows swoop between the upper stories of houses. Early in the morning we leave for Zagreb.

Ancient fortifications built to protect Ston where the Peljesac peninsula connects with the main land.

Marija and Anita pick us up in the morning for our drive to Dubrovnik, the last coastal destination on our journey. On the way out of Orebic, we stop at the old Riviera Hotel to pick up some rootstock for Marija. The old hotel, which looks like a Communist-era castle but is probably earlier, has been bought by a man from Texas and his Croatian wife. They’ll remodel it into ten or eleven luxury suites, and there is already a winery in the cellar, where we taste a very promising pošip from a tank that will be blended with the same wine matured in barrels. Next to the hotel they’ve planted zinfandel vines, which will begin producing in another four years or so.     A little later as we drive through the countryside we stop unannounced at Frano Milos’s winery, where we hurriedly taste three wines while he waits for an American tour to arrive. Frano is a curly-headed artist, perhaps in his early forties, and very charismatic—as testified by the magazine articles posted in his tasting room, showing him in GQ-esque poses. His work also decorates these walls, giving the tasting room a pleasant, personalized touch. Clearly a visit here is meant to be a well rounded sensory experience. But the wines I’ve seen so highly praised in Croatian wine publications deliver less than expected. Frano seems to be embracing a wine style from the time of his grandfather that strikes me as anachronistic in light of the clean, scientifically driven wines that are possible now. (These wines are now available in the U.S. from Blue Danube Wine Company.)     MILOS PLAVAC 2004 has medium-intensity red fruit on the nose, along with slight beef broth. It has light to medium body and medium tannin, with flavors of red cherries, very slight brett, and dry leaves. A wild, rustic wine that should be fruitier and less dusty.     STAGNUM 2004: 100% plavac mali. The wine has a bit of bottle stink that will blow off, but also an odd aroma of canned peas that I’d expect in a much older wine. In the mouth it shows a medium body, subdued fruit, and a long dried tobacco finish.     STAGNUM 2005 dessert wine (grapes unknown to me): This is lightly sweet, with dill and wild herbs on the nose, and more herbs on the palate. Very pleasant.     Lunch in the Shadow of Europe’s Great Wall     We continue driving and reach the town of Ston, which sits next to Mali Ston (Little Ston) at the narrowest part of the hinge where the Pelješac peninsula connects to the mainland. Starting in the 1300s, the Dubrovnik Republic constructed a great wall 5.5 kilometers long that trails over the hill between Ston and Mali Ston, punctuated by lookout points and forts. The longest such fortification in Europe, it was built to protect Ston, which has produced salt since Roman times, and whose salt revenues were an important contribution to the coffers of the republic. We stop only long enough to peek at the modern salt pans as we drive through Ston toward our lunch destination in Mali Ston. This diminutive Ston has an outsized reputation for seafood and shellfish, situated as it is at the end of the bay inlet, where the water is lightly salty and highly mineral. We eat lunch on the waterfront outside Taverna Bota Sare, which used to be a salt storage cellar; it is two stories tall inside, with a barrel ceiling. We have a singular meal of fresh local shellfish. One dish consists of large blue mussels; clams; fawn-brown mussels that are imported from Bosnia, 30 km away over the hill, as it’s illegal for ecological reasons to obtain them from the bay; and a mollusk described to us as a Noah’s Ark: the bivalve is shaped like the hull of a ship, and one needs to remove a “key,” a small, fin-shaped piece of shell that sits between the two main shells and projects into the muscle of the creature inside. Once the key is removed, the shell can be pried open easily with the fingers using the keyhole. This mixed mollusk dish is served in a white wine and garlic sauce, with a dish of just the brown mussels (my favorite) served alongside in a lightly creamy tomato broth. We mop it all up with thick, slightly crunchy semolina bread. We drink the local marastina wine and talk about klapa, the typical group vocal music of the Dalmatian coast that is accompanied by bass, guitars, and mandolins, among other instruments. The music playing in the restaurant is a klapa rendition of one of the most popular Croatian singers, Oliver. Other good groups are Ragusa and Maestral, but Marija and Anita each have friends and acquaintances who sing in local groups.     After lunch we wind through construction on the tiny local highway that snakes around the edges of coastal mountains and is the only road to Dubrovnik. (Construction delays give us more time to gaze contentedly at the little islands off the coast.) We enter the city via the spindly white Tudmana bridge high above Gruz bay and not so high above a gigantic white cruise ship docked outside the tiny old harbor. After settling in at our hotel, we head into the old city by bus. Our first impression is that this historic treasure reminds us of New York’s South Street Seaport in August: shuffling tour groups “following the sign,” and a uniformity of vendors selling mid-quality jewelry in classic or historically inspired designs to appeal to the seniors piling off cruise ships. Things are looking up after a bottle of Enjingi graševina (welschriesling) at Arsenal Taverna, which overlooks the old harbor and the modern hotels and fancy houses on the hillside outside the old city walls. We love the wine’s funky minerality and surprising delicacy. This is a good place to sample Croatian wines or see late-night musical groups, and the food is pleasant but average. We’ll return to the old city tomorrow in search of hidden gems and the life of the city away from the main drag.

Approaching Korčula by Ferry.

After gazing longingly for two days at the picturesque walled town of Korčula across the water from our hotel balcony, we finally hop on the ferry and head back to the island with Boris. He has arranged for his former boss, at Marco Polo Tours in Korčula town, to give us a tour of the old city. This charming, professorial man in a houndstooth jacket clearly loves his native city. He leads us up the steps to the old walled city—steps that used to be a drawbridge over the moat. On the outside of the city gate is a relief of St Mark’s lion—the lion of Venice. For some 400 years, until about 1800, Korčula was a part of the Venetian empire, at the same time that Orebic, across the water, was the farthest outpost of the Dubrovnik Republic. Just inside the main gate is the early Renaissance St. Mark’s Cathedral, with more lions guarding the portal, and two Tintorettos, among other treasures, inside. As we walk through town, we’re told that the streets were laid out in a fishbone pattern in order to control the passage of hot and cold breezes through the city. Marko Polo’s house is a picturesque ruin at the end of a passage overhung by mandarin trees and flowering bushes, but there are carefully numbered stones lying in a pile inside the foundations, awaiting the coming restoration and museumification. The ruins are so evocative that I find myself hoping they don’t restore it too completely. We climb the lookout tower attached to the house that once gave a view of this region’s extensive and highly profitable shipping traffic, as well as wargoing ships that were financed as business investments. Now we see only a giant white cruise ship anchored to the north.     The P.Z. Pošip Cooperative     From Korčula, we drive inland and meet enologist Janko Jovanov at the side of the road overlooking Čara (“char-a”). Čara is both a town and a designated wine region on Korčula. We look down into a narrow valley and see an industrial-looking winery and some 130 grape-growing plots. This is the cooperative producer P.Z. Pošip, which makes about 500,000 bottles a year. The grape plots (growing the indigenous pošip grape) are farmed by their 130-odd growers, who are issued guidelines by the government and annual spraying and maintenance plans by the winery. The result is individual plots of differing qualities. The best fruit, not more than 10% of the harvest, is selected for 20,000-30,000 bottles of the premium Marko Polo Pošip, which is produced only in years when grape quality is sufficient.     We descend to the vineyards and talk about the history of posip production here. Before the phylloxera disaster in the late 1800s, there were 4000ha of grapes growing on Korčula, of more than fifty different grape varieties, and production was about 70% red wine. Now there are fewer than 400ha, of eleven varieties, and the production is 70% white wine. Janko tells us of mass emigrations of Korčulans after phylloxera wiped out grape growing on the island, with the result that there are now communities of Korčulans as far away as Australia and Brazil. The pošip grape was once the predominant white variety in the general area. Now it’s almost exclusively grown on Korčula, although it is being planted on the islands of Brač and Hvar in an effort to regain its prominence as a quality white grape.Still, Janko says it is difficult to get reliable pošip cuttings for grafting without providing the plants for the cuttings themselves—the grape is just not common enough to be able to buy plants. Before lunch, we drive to the other end of this small valley to Smokvica (“little fig”), which is the second designated village for pošip production here. On the other end of the island, the white wine called Grk is produced from the grape of the same name, but we won't taste this until we're in Dubrovnik.     Food to Return For     Our second outstanding lunch in two days is at Mate in the town of Pupnat. It is another small restaurant in a stone room with a wood fireplace, where our hostess is the sister of our wonderful tour guide in Korčula town. We’re served an antipasti platter of two homemade cheeses, home-cured bacon and prosciutto, grilled eggplant, a brilliant eggplant spread with capers and spinach in it, homemade bread in slice and braid form, olives—plus an omelet of ham and wild asparagus. (As this thin, slightly bitter, intensely asparagussy asparagus is one of my favorite things, this makes me rapturously happy.) By now Aldo and I are full and fearful of upsetting our still-delicate stomachs, but out come three brilliant handmade pastas. One is ravioli stuffed with local goat cheese; one is quill pasta with whole shrimp and a light tomato cream sauce; and the last is my favorite: quill pasta with wild fennel and spiced with a whole chile. This is not all: Our hostess’s husband arrives and prepares the coals and grate in the fireplace to grill lamb basted with a fig leaf dipped in olive oil. Finally, dessert arrives, and it is no small thing. These treats are sublimely different from what we’re used to. There’s a granita of rosemary and local juniper and possibly a little lemon juice that I vow to try to re-create at home; light fried twists of dough dusted with powdered sugar that tastes of orange-flower water; a walnut-and-carrot cake with a two-inch-tall center layer of whipped cheese that has a slight banana flavor; and a granular and not-too-sweet chocolate almond torte accented with a little hot red pepper.     We taste three wines from P.Z. Pošip, of which only the Marko Polo is available in the States.     RUKATAC 2005 is a regional wine labeled “Korčula Wine Region,” made from the marastina grape local to Korčula and the Peljesac. It has light pear and melon on the nose, with slight mineral; light-bodied with only medium acidity, it has a pleasant citrus flavor, but is fairly simple. Naturally, it’s quite enjoyable with the local food we’re eating.     POŠIP ČARA 2005: This is the entry-level posip, but we find that posip has enough personality that even a basic wine well-made from it has a lot to offer. Again, there is a light pear/melon aroma; medium acidity and body; and on the palate a creamy citrus, pear, and melon flavor. There has been no ML, but the wine was matured in large neutral barrels for 2-1/2 months on the lees. It’s a very pleasant wine with good balance.     MARKO POLO POŠIP 2005 This has light citrus and vanilla, and ripe pear on the nose; the body is medium-full, with fairly intense pear on the palate, and a medium-long bitter-almond finish. (This underwent a 3-4 hour maceration, no ML, neutral oak.)     Later, sitting at the hotel with Boris, Marija, and Anita, we talk about the experimentation underway in the Pelješac. Marija and a partner in Dubrovnik are investing in a new planting scheme, reclaiming some old terraces that are now overgrown, and planting a few hectares to zinfandel to see what it will do in its native land. As the family is already pioneering cabernet in the Pelješac, this doesn’t seem like too bad an idea, even if it is a marketing move. The agricultural university in Zagreb has also reacted to the zinfandel discovery, by slowly cultivating crljenak, the genealogical parent grape of zinfandel, primitivo, and plavac mali. From all we’ve heard, it seems that most Croatian producers value their indigenous grape heritage even as plans are underway to experiment and grow the wine industry going forward.

Seaside Tasting Room of the Zlatan Plenkovic Estate on Hvar. (Photo courtesy Leith Steel)

A vineyard assistant named Nevin drives us the four hours south from Krk to Split in the rain, where we slog to the catamaran that will take us to Jelsa, on the north side of Hvar island, in 90 minutes. Jelsa is a gorgeous town with a riviera look—there’s obviously plenty of money here, at least in tourist season.     We’re on Hvar to visit the single winery in all of Croatia, called Zlatan Otok, that produces a Grand Cru wine. Zlatan Plenkovic, the owner, is not available to us, but his son Marin (who is finishing his studies to take up a position at the winery) takes good care of us for the twenty-odd hours we’re here. He drives us from Jelsa over the top of the island to the south side, where the winery is, via a single-lane tunnel with rough rock walls carved through the mountaintop. Marin pauses about 100 meters into the tunnel and points to a room off to the side where stainless-steel tanks are visible through the doorway—they store some of their white wine here without need for refrigeration (because of the cold rock). When they need the wine, they simply pump it out through hoses connected to a tank truck parked outside the tunnel. Come to think of it, those tanks must have been constructed inside the rock room, as they wouldn’t fit through the door!     The roadway is precipitous, with switchback curves and not a guardrail in sight. At one point we encounter a Range Rover (what folly!) that has to back up so we don’t slip off the one-and-a-half-lane road, onto the roof of a house, trying to pass it. We have a brief tour of the winery, then settle at the family house and pension lodgings three minutes away. The family is building a small tourist empire here, in this quiet, rural town Sveta Nedjelja which is isolated by the mountain looming above and by the lack of a direct road from here to fashionable Hvar city down the coast. In addition to the pension, the Plenkovic family have built a quite nice restaurant below the house on the waterfront, with a small marina attached, but have battled the winter waves each year, which wreak havoc on the underwater pilings and the restaurant windows.     Tasting Croatia’s Only Grand Cru     We sit around the family table with stoneworkers who are building a terrace in front of the house, and taste wine over supper of salad, sauteed mushrooms, roasted eggplant and octopus, and blood sausage, with a not-too-sweet walnut spice cake for dessert.     Zlatan makes a couple of whites from bogdanusa and posip grapes, of which the Otok Hvar is now being imported to the U.S. for the first time. It’s the plavac mali, the red grape that predominates in southern coastal Croatia and is closely related to zinfandel, that goes into Croatia’s grand cru. We taste the three Zlatan Plavacs side by side. The “Barrique” and the “Grand Cru” are available in our wine shop.     ZLATAN PLAVAC 2005 is 100% plavac mali matured in 5000-liter neutral barrels. It has a black cherry aroma and only medium tannin and extract, with flavors also of black cherries, blood, dry leaves/tobacco, and a tobacco finish. (This is great with the homemade spiced blood sausage we’re eating.)     ZLATAN PLAVAC Barrique 2004 spends 18-24 months in barrique. It has pronounced oak on the nose, laid over plums, blueberries, and slight tar; fairly intense flavors of black cherries, plums, dry tobacco, and new oak. A well made wine good for sipping now, or hold for two to three years. Fantastic with parmigiano.     ZLATAN PLAVAC Grand Cru 2003 spends the same 18-24 months in barrique as the wine above, but the best juice is selected for this wine. The difference is higher extract, more fruit on the nose, and a mild, sweet oak; incredible deep black fruit on the palate, much more depth, subtler oak than the barrique wine, and better integrated, with excellent balance. This will develop nicely for eight to ten years.     Up the Mountain to Vineyards and a Monastery     In the morning, it’s still raining off and on. Marin drives us up the hillside behind the winery on loose stone tracks that are just wide enough for the Jeep. The rocks around us are a hard conglomerate of sharp white stones glued together with iron-red silt. The thick red soil where the grapes grow is “made” by feeding the conglomerated stone through a rock grinder that breaks it down. The vineyards here are all plavac mali, but it’s unclear whether they belong to Zlatan or to one of the growers he buys from. He buys all the grapes produced between the winery below us and a point about 4km to the west, toward Hvar town. Marin tells us all the growers are organic. Ultimately the best juice ends up in the grand cru wine.     We’re at the very top of the steep vineyards, just beneath the rocky mountaintop, so we hike just a little farther up to a cave where there’s a tiny Augustine monastery dating to the 1500s. The mouth of the cave is huge. Just where the opening begins, there is a retaining wall with a stone staircase leading up through a gate to a level terrace. In the center of this yard there’s a well with a wooden cover, a cross, and an empty and dilapidated stone hut that now has grafitti inside from hikers and campers. On the right is a chapel which is still used at least once each year, when there’s an Easter procession up the hill through the vineyards with a statue of Christ on the cross. Up a few steps to one side of the cave is a shrine to the Virgin Mary, and up steps to the other side one can go to the back of the cave, behind the shrubbery surrounding the monastery. There’s a large chamber that Marin says once led through the mountain to two different destinations, but the access point is now purposely blocked with boulders.     After lunch we head to Hvar city, a lovely resort town that we don’t have time to see because we’re catching a ferry to Korcula. It has finally stopped raining, and we sit in the cushioned outdoor lounge in front of one of the new boutique hotels drinking Cuba Libres and espresso until the boat arrives.

Niko Bura in the middle of an extensive tasting at his kitchen table.

Niko Bura is a Croatian garagiste, with his setup on the ground floor of his house, and he is one of this region’s leaders in quality. Niko is making wine in the vineyard, not in the winery. Indeed, we met him this morning tilling the soil between newly planted vines on the family’s Dingač hillside. Niko himself is soft-spoken, clearly proud of his artist daughter, whose painting hangs on the wall of the small tasting room, and appears on the label of Bura Galerija, a light cabernet sauvignon that was first released this year, made from grapes grown in a prime valley location. He is also experimenting with marsellane, a cross between cabernet and grenache. It will be three or four years before the first bottling. The wine called Bura, of 100% Dingač plavac mali, was first produced in 1995. This year saw the release of the first bottles of Mare, from Postup plavac mali and named after its maker, Niko’s sister Marija.     MARE 2004, Postup. For this vintage, the grapes were partially raisined due to lack of water on the hillsides. The wine is an unfiltered opaque purple with an aroma of hay, black fruit, and beef broth. It’s full-bodied, with creamy black fruit (plums, stewed blueberries) and slight raisin, and a long finish of fresh tobacco. Definitely a new-world style wine.     BURA 2004 Dingač. Bura is the masculine to Mare’s feminine. It too is unfiltered; it has more pine on the nose than Mare, stewed black fruit, and hay. It is fuller bodied, rounder, with the same creamy black fruit and long finish. The BURA 2003 offers herbs on the nose and palate, and more secondary flavors: hay, figs, slight beef broth, stewed blueberries, and a beautiful finish.     The 2002 has less tannin, sweeter oak, and a licorice undernote. It has a hay/camomile aroma, and slight raisin and prune on the palate.     After our longest day of tasting, we’ve experienced an exciting cross-section of Pelješac production that makes us want to go back and taste the wine of every other producer, to delve deeper into the history and future of wine in this region. The Dingač and Postup regions are tiny, but inland hillsides are being planted to vine. Where will the region be ten years from now?     (The Bura Dingač 2005 is available in our wine shop.)     Text and photos by Katherine Camargo, DWS / kcamargo@verizon.net

The Dingač at its best: steep slopes, old vines, tons of sunshine right at the coast.

We arrive by ferry on one end of the island of Korčula and are picked up by Marija Mrgudic and her son Boris, who drive us to the ferry dock at the other end of the island. This is a sneak preview only—we’re leaving the island immediately for Orebic, on the mainland, and will return to Korčula in a day or two. Orebic is a waterfront town on the edge of the Pelješac peninsula, where the renowned wine producing areas of Dingač and Postup cling precariously to hillside terraces overlooking the Adriatic. In terms of prestige, Dingač and Postup are the Napa and Sonoma of Croatia. Marija Mrgudic and her brother Niko Bura and their families are a leading wine producer in the area, under the name Bura Estate Winery. Boris is in his twenties, and does marketing and PR for the winery while also working in marketing for a local hotel group. He spends his weekend driving us through vineyards, crisscrossing the Pelješac, and talking with us about the growing private wine industry and rampant experimentation in the region, notably with plavac mali’s cousin, zinfandel.     (Quick digression on pronunciation: The letter ‘c’ in these Croatian place names tends to be pronounced ‘ch’ or sometimes ‘tz’. Very approximately: ‘ding-gotch’, ‘or-uh-bitch’, ‘kor-chula’, ‘pell-yuh-shotz’.)     Our Lady of Angels     First thing in the morning, Marija and her spicy friend Anita, a lawyer and artist, take us up the hill above our waterfront hotel to the 15th-century Monastery of Our Lady of Angels, which offers one of the best views of Korčula, across the water, but also tells us much of the history of Orebic and the families here. This was a shipping town, and the houses along the waterfront belonged to the ship owners and captains, and still have in their front gardens some of the exotic specimens of plants brought back from their travels in the early 20th century. Back during the Venetian empire, when Korčula was controlled by Venice and Orebic was part of the Dubrovnik state, priests and others would use the hillside monastery to observe goings on in Korčula and send smoke-signal reports by relay to Dubrovnik. Outside the monastery is a captain’s cemetery, where local sea captains and other townspeople were buried after there was no more space in the cloister. In the cloister, bodies were buried “standing up,” to conserve space—the stones over their graves are about 2-1/2 feet square. Also there is the gravestone of one of Marija and Niko’s earliest ancestors in this region, from the seventeenth century. Etched into the gravetop stone is an outline of the pointed spade used even back then to plant grapevines in the rocky soil.          The Dingač and Postup Vineyards     We drive with Boris through the vineyards on gravel roads almost as precipitous as those on Hvar. There are about 1000ha of vines on the Peljesac peninsula, with about 60ha in Postup and maybe 75 in Dingač—much of the balance is in the valley, which produces table-wine grapes. The vineyards in Dingač (shown top, descending to the Adriatic) and Postup (shown below) are all built on terraces, some only one or two plants wide. The slope is so steep here that, when working certain terraces, the soil tiller has to be roped to the axle of a truck on the road above to keep it from tumbling down the vineyards. The producer Bura owns just over 2 hectares of vineyards. Their plants yield up to 1kg of fruit per vine on the slopes, but higher up, under harsher conditions, the vines will yield an average of only a half kilo per vine.     These hillsides used to be worked with donkeys who would haul grapes over the top of the mountain to the winery in pannier baskets, making maybe three trips a day. Likewise, they would haul the wine back over the mountain to the port of Trstenik for shipping to Europe. In the 1970s, a rock-walled tunnel, like the one on Hvar, was cut through the mountain, making the journey to the winery much easier by truck.     (Also check out the wines made by the Dingač Winery in our wine shop.)          The Famous Grgić     On a promontory at the mouth of the incredibly beautiful, tiny port of Trstenik stands the Grgić winery and the home of winemaker Kresimir Vuckovic. Miljenko Grgić, a vanguard California wine maker and head of the exclusive Grgich Hills Estate in Rutherford since 1977, famously returned to his Croatian roots in the mid-90s, and opened a winery here. (Note the tiny difference in the Croatian "Grgić" and the American "Grgich" spelling of his name.) We drop in very briefly and taste:     POSIP 2005, made from grapes bought from Korčula, cold fermented, with 3 months in new French oak. On the nose there is pear and pineapple. The light oak on the nose turns more prominent on the palate, with white fruit flavors and a shortish pineapple finish. This is clearly an international style wine.     PLAVAC MALI 2004. A fairly intense raisin and herbal plum nose leads to flavors of plums, blueberries, tobacco, and subtle oak, with a medium-length plum and tobacco finish. Neither is available in the U.S.          Eating Local     For lunch Boris drives us into the valley to the tiny town of Kuna, where the Antunovic family runs an agriturismo, where they raise donkeys, sheep, fruits and vegetables, and produce their own prosciutto. This is evident in the Antunovic restaurant, found by stepping into a narrow pedestrian alley and up a few stone steps. It’s a wonderful, dark stone room with beamed ceilings hung with prosciuttos, bacon, and a pig foot here and there. The fresh red roses on each table flanked with benches are family produced as well. We’re offered the traditional tiny glass of grappa with herbs as we walk in—also Antunovic production, along with the dried figs, crystalline with natural sugar, that we eat with the grappa. (We later buy a package of these, strung on string with bay leaves, to take home.) The white wine with lunch is a local variety made from rukatac or marastina, two names for the same grape. It’s soft and pleasant, especially with the rustic homemade food. First we’re presented with plates of home-cured anchovies, and a platter of pickled onions, home-cured olives, prosciutto, cheese, and thick, dense bread. Then there’s a local stew variation from this area of the Pelješac, called pikatic—basically lamb liver and intestine in a heavy, meaty gravy—delicious, but as we discover later, not for the weak of stomach. We also have grilled beefsteak over roasted potatoes and vegetables with a simple plavac mali. And for dessert, with a local sheep cheese that is steeped as a wheel in olive oil, we try a good quality plavac mali (not available in the States):     VEDRAN KIRIDZIJA DINGAC 2004: a medium-extract red that smells of the herbs on the local hillsides, pine, and a light, sweet oak; medium-bodied, plum, blueberry, and herbs on the palate, and a medium length.     Tasting at Matusko     We drive ten minutes to Potomje, at the inland end of the tunnel. This is the location of the still-operating large cooperative winery where growers were obliged to take their grapes during communism. Just down the lane are Matusko and Bura Estate. Matusko is a much larger producer than Bura, at 500,000 liters of total production, and has a shop and cellar where tours can come and taste. Mato Matusko is Marija’s cousin and looks like a movie star cowboy. He is president of a group of eight or so Dingač producers who are trying to create a wine consortium and tourist trail. As for the grapes, Matusko buys from partner-growers according to the position of their vineyards and the quality of the fruit. He provides pesticides, etc., to his partners, but says that the leading producers are heading toward organic farming in anticipation of Croatia’s EU membership. In his cellar, we taste three of his Dingač wines, from 2005, 2003, and 2001. The 2005 is not yet bottled, but promises to be excellent. I find a clean grapey aroma, still-strong acid and tannin with a soft sweet oak on the palate, sumptuous black fruit, and a long and plummy cocoa finish. The 2003 has a brandy/raisin aroma, pleasingly full extract, deep plum on the palate, and the same dusky cocoa-plum finish. Again, the oak is sweet and subtle. The 2001 sits in a barrel at the side of the tasting room. Mato has reserved this for himself, and for good reason—it’s rich and syrupy like aged balsamic. None are available in the States.     Text and photos by Katherine Camargo, DWS / kcamargo@verizon.net

Panoramic view of the city of Krk on the island of Krk.

The next morning, we set off for the island of Krk, driven by Antonella. Driving east toward Rijeka, we pass Tuscan-looking hill towns and a public forest at the side of the small, local highway, which Antonella tells us is a truffle forest where locals go to try their luck. There is a controversy about continuing public access to the forest, which the truffle hunters consider their right. At Rijeka, we need to take a sharp right turn and head south, but first, we need to get past Mt. Ucka. There's a tunnel through the mountain, but we decide to go over it, and head upward at a steep angle along switchback curves, past tiny, five-house towns, through the forest. We stop as the road starts to slope downward again, to look out over the Adriatic toward Krk to the south and Rijeka below us (shown), situated in the dog's-leg turn where Istria becomes the Kvarner region of northern coastline, mercilessly blown in winter by the bura, Croatia's version of the mistral winds. First we drive through the resort villas of Opatija, playing a game of "if I were in the market for a luxurious Adriatic home..."--then it's industrial Rijeka, and, very soon, the bridge onto Krk.     Welcome to Krk     The northern tip of the island, where the bridge is, is all but completely bald--scoured by the bura. We drive the road down the middle of the island and stop somewhere about halfway, on the side that faces the mainland, at the winery of Anton Katunar, where we'll stay the night in the winery guest room.     Anton Katunar is robust and outgoing, happy to spend the day showing us around, disappearing every so often to tend to some aspect of his business that continues around him. Tomorrow there will be a group of 300 tourists at the winery for a tasting lunch, and the big group presentation rooms need to be arranged. Indeed, there are large facilities for group visits here, both inside, with a view of the vast valley vineyards, and on a large roofed terrace outdoors. Tour groups are a way of life for many Croatian wine makers.     Behind the winery in the valley are 10 ha of vineyards planted in slightly iron soil. Anton tells us the island used to have four or five thousand hectares of vines but is now down to about 200 ha. He himself is expanding as part of a Croatian government incentive program to plant 15,000 ha more grapes, half in the coastal region, in the next two years. Anton has found a south-facing limestone vineyard in the south of the island. On his computer, he shows us aerial maps of the vineyard that show completely white on top of the hills due to all the white rocks lying on the surface, then mixed tan and white on the slopes, then dark green in the valley. He shifts the map to the top of the hill and zooms in to show us odd-shaped patches of tan/green among the stark white where people, doubtless over years, have laboriously cleared the rocks to make the land usable. Rocks seem to be a theme here: All over the central part of the island where we are, between Vrbnik and Krk town, we see massive rubbles of stones lying naturally on the landscape as if dumped there by the truckload. Where people want to graze sheep--without letting them wander in flocks along the road--or grow olive trees, they've cleared small patches of land by shifting the rocks to wide-based piles with more formal stone walls built on top, leaving small pools of dusky green grass between wide, six-foot-high rock borders. Anton also shows us an aerial overlay showing ownership of the land. Many hundreds of people own tiny strips of the hillside, sometimes in pieces only 100m by 30m, because of the way the land is subdivided between each child in a family, down through generations. Anton has had to track down hundreds of people to acquire his parcel, some of them no longer living in Croatia.     Anton produces 80% žlahtina (he makes 150,000 liters out of a total 900,000 on all of Krk) but he's developing his red line based on syrah and grenache. We go to an attractive underground tasting room lined with bottles, where we're served lunch during our tasting of his line--a brilliant spaghetti with small, tender, sweet scampi and a few tomatoes and a lot of olive oil of Anton's own production, full-flavored and spicy. The pasta really plays up his entry-level žlahtina. Then we proceed to a large platter of grilled seafood and vegetables--langoustines with the heads and claws on and saltwater still in the shells, large squid with thick bodies, roasted red and yellow peppers, eggplant that has soaked up the amazing olive oil like a sponge. Then there's local sheep and cow cheese, of which I favor a rustic parmigiana-like piece with nice rennet crystals in it. It's beautiful with the overripe melon of Anton's chardonnay (not available in the States). Wines available in the US are:     ŽLAHTINA 2005: Medium-low acid (less than 5%), medium body with a floral nose and white fruit on the palate. It's very round but hasn't undergone malo, slightly mineral and slightly oily in an appealing way. It's a simple wine, but it truly shines with the seafood.     "ANTON" 2005: 85% syrah plus three indigenous varieties (debejan, brajdica, sansigot) matured in large old Slavonian oak barrels: This has a black-fruit nose with medium acidity, body, and tannin and very nice fruit with medium extract. It's is a nice fruit-forward style of wine that's more accessible and immediately pleasant than many of the other reds we've tasted.     "ANTON" Reserva 2004: 50% grenache, 5% syrah, plus the three local varieties above, with one year in oak and one year in bottle. The tannin and acid are already mellow, and the wine shows medium-intensity black plums, blueberries, nutmeg, fresh oak, and a berry-spice finish. It's a well made wine of only medium length, but it's a pleasant fruit-forward style, and it drinks perfectly now.     After lunch, Anton explains to us a bit about the famous origin-of-zinfandel research. Crljenak (churl-yen-ack) is the local grape that started it all. According to Anton, crljenak is identical to zinfandel and primitivo, and stepfather to plavac mali, with an indigenous grape as the other half of the parentage. We find that everyone we ask has their own interpretation of the zinfandel-plavac mali relationship. Meanwhile, the same local Croatian scientist who was studying the crljenak grape, and who helped American Carol Meredith on her DNA research tour in Croatia, is now studying the origins of zlahtina and other assumed indigenous varieties on Krk. Žlahtina is native only to Krk as far as anyone knows; very little is grown on the mainland but it's unknown whether it's grown under another name elsewhere.     The Medieval Town of Vrbnik     After our hours-long lunch, Anton takes us down the street to Vrbnik, where he was born and grew up. Old Vrbnik is perched on a hill overlooking the Adriatic channel between Krk island and the mainland. As we walk up the hill to the old town, now occupied in large part by weekenders from elsewhere, we encounter one of the local priests, whom Anton knows. This is a treat, as we're brought into the rectory and shown a massive book hand-lettered in Glagolitic script (an early relative of Cyrillic) that was finished in 1462, a decade or so after Gutenberg first started printing. Sections begin with figural display caps showing a biblical figure rendered in red, blue, and green ink, plus liquid gold. (I can't believe I'm touching something this old.) We continue up the hill, through tiny passages that let through only people or motorbikes or the mini-tractors used here that are no larger than a ride-on mower but shaped exactly like tractors. The agate stones of the streets are worn so smooth after centuries that crosshatching was incised into them maybe twenty years ago for renewed traction.     Then we go across the island to Krk city, where Anton lives now. He shows us the various Roman gates of the city, some of which are underground at the site of what is currently a subterranean bar/café. We have dinner with Anton's son, Tony, and the owner of the harborside restaurant we're in: platters of local sliced cheese, olives, tuna, sardines in salt and in vinegar, octopus salad, and pizza-dough bread--plus Anton's žlahtina, and his "Anton" syrah blend with the roasted island lamb on a bed of roasted peppers, potatoes, and carrots. On the way home a jolly Anton careens at 100kph along the winding country roads, freely using the oncoming lane to soften particular curves, and slowing only slightly for a flock of 15 sheep who scurry out of the way, bells dingling. In the pitch-black countryside at our winery room, we watch a lightning display, then retire in preparation for a long drive to Split tomorrow.

Line-up of the bottles at the Kozlovic tasting.

We drive through Slovenia toward Istria, the area just below Trieste, Italy, that was part of Italy for twenty-five years until the end of World War II. As we approach Croatia, the Germanic-looking houses and barns and the typical hay drying racks--a ladderlike wooden rack open to the air but protected beneath a roof--disappear, and we no longer see maypoles in the little towns we pass. Our destination is Porec, about a third of the way down the western coast of Istria. It's a pretty resort town with bars and restaurants lining the waterfront street on the land side, and luxury power yachts lining it on the water side. We're here to join a group from Vinistra, the Istrian wine trade show that is going on this weekend, on a pleasure tour by boat. Our hosts are three prominent producers, Kozlovic, Degrassi, and Matosevic, who have been working together to build an Istrian wine brand closely linked to tourism in the area. As the boat makes its way south along the coast to Rovinj, a beautiful medieval fortified town crowned by a church, we sit on the top deck in the frigid night air sipping the wines of our hosts and talking with Marko and his winemaker, Jurij Brumec, who has come with us, as well as writer Sam Gugino and his wife, Mary Lee, from Philadelphia, who are on their way to Slovenia to visit Movia for Wine Spectator. By the end of the night there is singing and dancing down below, and someone has brought a marvelous pastry typical of the town of Rab: a spiral tasting of almond paste and orange rind that is a marvel with Kozlovic sweet muscat. We make our way to Hotel San Rocco, in Umag, back north toward Momjan, where Gianfranco Kozlovic joins us in the morning to take us to his cellars.     At the Kozlovic Cellars     Momjan is a small town located on the hilltop above Valle--the valley where Gianfranco, his business-manager wife, Antonella, his family, and perhaps five other people reside. On our way there, we turn off the road and drive through vineyards up the side of a hill, getting out to examine the old-vine malvasia that goes into Kozlovic's Santa Lucia bottling. It's about ten in the morning when we settle in Gianfranco's tasting room next to the winery.     For clean, well made wines, Kozlovic is one of the leaders in Istria. About 60% of Gianfranco's production is from malvasia, the typical white grape here. Like most Croatian producers, he can easily sell each year's small production within his own country, with the influx of European and other tourists during the summers. A few producers choose to build an international reputation by exporting a small amount of wine; Kozlovic sends 15-20% of his production into the surrounding European countries and the U.S. (Usually we have his Malvasia available in our wine shop, sometimes the Othello as well). Kozlovic Malvasia 2006, which is about to be bottled at the time of our tasting--has medium hay and white fruit on the nose, an unusually high acidity for malvasia, which is prone to the opposite problem, a medium body and a palate of white fruit with a slight mineral note and an herbal finish.     Kozlovic "Santa Lucia" 2004 malvasia is made from the forty-year-old vines we walked through in the morning. Ten percent of this production is matured in the acacia barrels often used in Istria, with another 10% in French barriques, and the balance in stainless steel tanks. The wine is a medium straw gold with a beautiful pronounced nose of honey, apricot, and pie crust. A lovely minerality comes out on the palate and carries through on a long finish. This wine is a brilliant pairing with the heady animal flavor of two-year-old thick-cut prosciutto cured by Gianfranco's father. Later we taste the Santa Lucia 2005, not yet bottled, which has an earthier nose than the '04 and a more forward minerality, and shows green pear and honeysuckle on the palate--this will be beautiful.     Kozlovic "Othello" 2003. This red wine of 70% teran, 15% merlot, and 15% cabernet is not produced every year. It is an unfiltered deep purple, with aromas of plums, blueberries, and deep-black ripe cherries. An inky, high-extract wine, with black fruit carrying over to the palate, slight beef-broth and herbal notes, soft oak, and a long finish.      The Kozlovic 2006 Muscat has just been bottled, and I remember it fondly from the previous evening, when it so pleased me with the almond pastry from Rab. Its sweetness is not cloying--in fact, the wine has a slight spritz--and the expected orange-blossom aroma of muscat has more of honeysuckle in it, with orange and slight licorice notes on the nose, joined by ripe pear on the palate. Fresh and light.     Kozlovic "Dulcinea" 2004, a late-harvest muscat made with 20% raisined grapes, is less sweet than the muscat, earthy, with a light floral quality and fresh apricot on the palate.     Gianfranco Kozlovic is not only ambitious for the wines of brand-Istria, he's also clearly driven to constantly improve his own wines. "Every day the consumer asks for more, and we must give more. The same quality is not enough." Later, at the Vinistra trade fair, we see just how many other producers are striving for a high-quality image for Istrian wines.

Barrel tasting in Slovenia's oldest wine cellar, Ptujska Klet.

[This trip was taken in early May. It was organized by an importer for whom my husband is a consultant.]     The three of us wind through the streets of Ptuj in the car, past the hilltop castle, a monastery, and countless unknown wonders. We won't see anything in Slovenia's oldest town (mentioned by Tacitus in AD 69) except Slovenia's oldest wine cellar, Ptujska Klet, which can be traced back to the year 1239. When we arrive, we are given first the tourist treatment, then the behind-the-scenes tour. As tourists, we walk through a cold cellar beneath the visitor center and tasting rooms, where there are rows of oval wooden barrels taller than I am, rich dark-chocolate wood trimmed in forest green, with picturesque scenes of winemaking carved (recently) on the barrel heads. We also see the famous wine archive, where wines dating back to 1917 are stored, recorked every twelve years. Tito drew wines from this archive, and anyone fairly young can still buy a wine from their birth year, back to at least the 1950s, in the shop next to the tasting rooms. There we spot a wine from my husband's birth year--a welschriesling from 1959--for 600 euros. (Can it possibly still be drinkable?) I should state right now that Ptujska Klet's wines are not yet available in the U.S.--the notes below are just a tease.     In the tasting room, we are joined by Bojan Kobal, the enthusiastic and amiable thirty-year-old enologist, who takes us through the lineup. Ptujska Klet is clean and modern in its winemaking. The semi-cooperative operation buys from 140 growers. Importantly, it can afford to select the best fruit, all picked by hand and grown under a program of restricted chemical use prescribed by the winery. This is the Maribor region of Slovenia, where wine production is 80% white, of which some 50% is welschriesling. Our later walk through the working cellars, with numerous stops for barrel and tank samples, suggests much experimentation going on here; on the higher end (the Nobl line), the production is quite small, at 600 cases or so. Of the whites tasted upstairs, the most interesting are:     "Noblesse," a rumeni muskat (yellow muscat) with a beautiful muscat nose, off-dry and fairly simple, but with a lingering perfume.     "Nobl" Cuvee 2005, of traminer, chardonnay, and sauvignon blanc--a tank sample with a long finish and a layer of sweet barrique oak that will mellow after bottling.     "Nobl" 2005 Traminer (last year's Slovenian dry wine champion), an oily, almost-full body and honeyed mineral flavor, with slight lychee/floral notes--good character and depth. For this wine, half the grapes were raisined at picking, and the halves were fermented separately, then blended.     Red wines are only 15% or so of the winery's production. We taste a few pale pinots and a couple of blaufrankisch, of which the 2004, with a red plum and rosehip nose and an earthy, black-pepper finish is most pleasant. We taste a more impressive sample in the cellar, though, from a barrel that will be bottled in '09.     The tourist complex winds into the rest of the cellars, which extend beneath the city streets for blocks and bring us up beneath the winery a five-minute walk across town. We pass more giant oval barrels and barriques, plus an aisle of glass-lined concrete tanks, and row upon row of stainless steel tanks of various sizes, from which we taste another dozen samples, including a couple of pinot noirs with promise (more extract than those mentioned above), a sweet muscat and an excellent sweet German riesling. It's cold down here--I can see my breath as we examine thousands of bottles cellared in square brick bins on the floor, all coated in thick black mold, even the fairly recent vintages of the 90s.     We return with out host, Marko, to his home in central Slovenia, for a homemade lunch of light chicken broth with short, straight noodles; green salad dressed in local pumpkin seed oil; veal in a bath of savory brown gravy, accompanied by sour cream and blackcurrant jam; and marvelous, billowing pillows of layered dumpling dough filled with a mild, ricotta-like cheese. Thus fortified, we depart by car for Istria.

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