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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 aren’t available in the U.S.)     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.

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 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

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

I walked through Pile Gate in Dubrovnik, my friend Ivana leading the way down the Stradun and then off on a side street that I hadn't yet discovered in the Old Town. We arrived at a bar named Carpe Diem, sat down in the early evening and ordered. I had no idea what to order. I didn't speak Croatian and so I was ordered a glass of red wine. At this point, everything changed. The wine was the Zlatan Plavac from Zlatan Plenković.     That was in 2004 and I remember thinking it would be fantastic to learn more about these deceptively good Croatian wines, but there was nothing to be found. While beach tourism was taking off in Croatia, there were no wine brochures and there were no wine guides. People in most of the shops didn't really know all that much as wine was wine. Frustrated and stubborn, I dug and started to read every scrap of news I could find. I drank more wine. I learned Croatian. I found importers in the US like Blue Danube Wine Company, learned more, and drank more wine.     In 2007, I met my future wife who helped me to focus my interest in the wines (as she also loved wine and the Western Balkans) and plan out a trip to the region with two purposes: drink even more wines and finally write an English language book about them. After finishing the research, the writing began and over a year later, Vinologue: Dalmatia Herzegovina has emerged.     While Jasenka Pilac has the honors of writing the first English language book that is specifically about the origins of Zinfandel, we have the honor of writing the first guide to the region. It culls together everything that we learned the hard way while traveling and tells the history of the regions, the winemakers, and of course, the wines. In Croatia, we travel to North Dalmatia, the Islands, and South Dalmatia. The we head in to Bosnia & Herzegovina, specifically to the Herzegovina region. You might be asking why Dalmatia and Herzegovina. Well, that's one of the things about the Vinologue series that we're starting. We focus on a region of winemakers who all produce wine in a similar manner with similar varietals. This can easily transcend borders as we see in this case.     But, enough about the history of everything as it's all in the book. For those looking to learn more about the region or prepare for a trip to see the viticulture, the book is available now by ordering through the Vinologue site and costs $15 plus $4 shipping to the US and Canada or $7 shipping everywhere else. It's 135 pages with 20 pages of color photos as well as region maps.

...says Gary Vaynerchuk of the Wine Library TV after tasting his first Zlatan Plavac Barrique. Gary continued all excited about this find: "This wine is sensational, downright great sensational." Thanks for your kind words, Gary, you confirm what we and many of our customers already knew: There are excellent wines produced in Croatia today and Zlatan Plenkovic is one of the top producers in the country.     For details on Gary's excitement tune into the third part of the recent edition of the Wine Library TV, episode 553:     Wine Library TV, episode 553.     And if you like to encounter some really good Croatian Malvasia and Grasevina we recommend the wines made by Kozlovic and Enginji. They rock just like the Zlatan Plavac rocks. Cheers!

So, what is Plavac Mali? Where is Plavac Mali? How do you even say, Plavac Mali? Let's take a look at all of these items as we delve in detail into this particular grape.     Plavac Mali (pronounced Plahvahts Mahlee) is a red grape varietal that is native to Croatia and more specifically, native to Southern Dalmatia. This is a strip of land that has Bosnia Herzegovina to the east and the Adriatic Sea to the west. It gets an obscene amount of sun throughout the year, so Plavac Mali is a happy grape to have Dalmatia as it's home.     By far and away, Plavac Mali is the dominant red grape in Dalmatia. Others like Merlot, Shiraz, and a number of minor native grapes pop up here and there, but inevitably, if you see a field of red wine grapes, they will be Plavac Mali. It wasn't always this way though. Many, many years ago, there was another grape that enjoyed the Dalmatia summers which was called, Crljenak Kaštelanski. It has since been discovered that this wine is one and the same with Zinfandel in California and Primitivo in Italy. It just happened that as history went, Crljenak Kaštelanski didn't have the staying power of Plavac Mali and it's actually the case that while the Croatians loved the taste of Crljenak Kaštelanski, it can be a tricky grape to grow in the area. Thusly, they crossbred it with Dobričić and Plavac Mali was the outcome, which has grown far and wide over the rugged karst that forms the Croatian Adriatic Coast.     As to how Plavac Mali tastes, there isn't any one way to describe it. It varies whether it was grown in the north, the south, the mainland, the islands, or even by different neighbors. When grown in more of a New World, California style, it can pick up Zinfandel qualities, being a very deep, intensely flavorful wine full of fruit in the front of it. When grown in the traditional manners, the wine is a good deal lighter. The body isn't as thick and the finish can be very smooth. This allows it to be paired very well with meals.     My personal preference for the wine are the years where the vines get a great deal of sun with little to no rain. 2007 was a year such and the wines that I tasted in Dalmatia last year as they were aging showed all the signs of being strong, flavorful, and extremely welcoming to those of us accustomed to New World characteristics. Even still, the winemakers of Croatia tend to hold back a bit and at around 14% alcohol at most, the Plavac Malis we'll be seeing will pair better with most any meal than the California Zinfandels that can sometimes hit 19%.     If you're curious to taste this for yourself, check out Plavac Mali today.

We recently had the enjoyment of eating at the new digs of Tinderbox. It's a restaurant in the Bernal Heights area of San Francisco that is wedged in the middle of a burgeoning gourmet ghetto. The dishes are focused around that growing genre of food called, "New American", which, as was the case at Tinderbox, means new twists on old dishes that surprise you in new ways. The menu has been coupled together with a very unique and tasty wine list compiled by the sommelier and general manager, Omar White. It includes a good number of Blue Danube Wine selections like the exotic Juris St. Laurent from Austria, an unoaked Hungarian Szõke Chardonnay, and the indigenous Pošip Marco Polo from the Croatian island of Korcula among others.     We started with a nice Dolcetto to warm up our palates. It was inviting and light, yet still flavorful and enjoyable to sip with our appetizers. It also had the ability to not trounce the fact that one of us had the grilled sardine appetizer.     From there, we split off with a glass of white for the cod and a bottle of Bura Dingač for the game hen, steak, and avocado cutlet. All of these dishes were delicious, but it was the last of which on that list was the most remarkable. The server summed it up best by saying, "Who knew you could grill an avocado?" Who indeed, but it works. It really, really works and when paired with a nice, deep-bodied red wine, it only works to amplify it.     Dessert was a lovely affair as well. Everything we had was paired with a very nice Five Puttonyos Tokaji. The sweetness of this Hungarian dessert wine was not overpowering to our closing dishes and once again, worked to complement not fight with the complexity of the desserts.     We found the atmosphere of the restaurant to be very nice and fit well with what we look for in a place to dine. The service isn't snooty, just knowledgeable and helpful, which is a welcome change to a great many restaurants in The City. It's also good to see that the establishment caters to people eating in groups (we were four) and those dining solo with a small, adjunct room just up a small set of stairs in the back. The crowd seems to fill in from about 8:30-10, but with a recent review in the SF Chronicle, the crowd is bound to come earlier and leave later. And naturally if this isn't enough word of mouth for you, read up on what others are saying these days.

Over a summer, two travelers drink their way through the wines of Mediterranean Europe          Hrvoj Baković is a tad tricky to find. It's true that he's in one of the biggest towns on Brač, Supetar, but we were on the lookout for a full winery and instead found his home. He was a little surprised by our tenacity (as were we) but he was very welcoming nonetheless, inviting us in for a little chat.     He's quite a character who worked for many years as a sailor in New Zealand to save some money to start his own winery, before returning back to his homeland. Once there, he bought five hectares of land and worked to build up his winery. He started at something of a disadvantage because while his family has a history of growing grapes, they didn't have a history of making wine.     None of this has held back Hrvoj and he has learned a great deal about the climate of Brač in a short time. He knows what grapes work and what don't. He is one of the few wine makers who has tried other grapes only to fall back on Plavac Mali because the grapes can handle the climate the best. Others varietals grow fine for some time and then just dry up suddenly without warning. His vines are on the south side of the island, getting regular sun as well as the sun which reflects off the water, making for a lot of light on his vines. There is another place this happens and that is in the Dingač region on Pelješac. How does this effect the taste? A great deal as we found out.     And this is why Baković was such a surprise to us. For one, we weren't able to taste his wine on the spot and had to take a bottle of Plavac Murvica 2003 with us for later. Once opened, the aromas were fantastic. There was a sweetness to the nose that reminded us of, yes, that's right, Dingač Plavac Mali. But, his Plavac built upon this with nice plum aromas. The body was a lot of fun and lovable. The oak tones were very subtle and the finish was clean. It's a wine that we highly recommend for eating with red meats. There is a touch of dryness to the finish develops in a way that is perfect. It is an astounding example of how good Plavac Mali can be and how a perfect Plavac should taste.     With some Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon vines coming in to production over the next two years, Hrvoj is one to watch and the reason that so many critics in his homeland rave about his wines.

Over a summer, two travelers drink their way through the wines of Mediterranean Europe          Dol is a small village tucked away in the deep recesses of a small valley of the island of Brač, which explains the name that merely means 'valley' in Croatian. It's a really lovely village that doesn't seem to see a lot of traffic and because it's not near the beach, the look of the town is 100% authentic with no ugly beach apartments. This also explains why there are only 112 people living in a village that once sported a slightly more bustling 750 souls. It is here, nestled in a 130 year old house and wine cellar that Frane Matulić makes his wines.     He started four years previous and is currently pumping out 27,000 liters of wine a year. This is produced from the one hectare that he cultivates and about 20 more that he buys from. There is a wine growing tradition in his family, which has been additionally tempered with a dose of large business acumen working as the general director for Badel 1892, a massive alcohol producer in Croatia that is based in Zagreb. It was only after working there for 25 years that he decided to somewhat retired and start making wine. Of which, he makes several varietals: Plavac Mali, Pošip, Viver (a red), and Vivera (a white).     We started off tasting his 2005 Plavac Mali barrique. It has a nice earthy nose on top of standard Plavac aromas. There are a bit of moist blackberries that carry though under the top aromas of the nose. While the body is a tad acidic at first, it mellows out a great deal with air. The finish cleans up with some nice round buttery tones. Even still, Frane is something of a perfectionist and says that his 2006 vintage will be even stronger because it actually spent less time in the barrels. We could taste the difference the barrels made when we moved to the 2005 Plavac Mali that hadn't been barrel-aged. The lack of oak in this vintage makes it even more drinkable than the barrique. The body is very light and easygoing. The light berries in the nose come through even easier and as Frane showed us, it is quite splendid when blended with the barrique 50-50.     Frane is very interesting fellow who, despite his business background is right at home amongst the grapes. Given his ability to change and grow with his wines, the vintages in the next few years will undoubtedly be sound examples of the fine wine making tradition on Brač that died out for awhile, yet is coming back to some degree.

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