I just had the pleasure of traveling down the Adriatic coast of Croatia for the first time. Not a wine tour - a vacation. My interests were spending time with my good friends and traveling companions, learning local culture and history, seeing the sites, hearing Balkan voices. But from Istria to Dubrovnik the land was filled with vineyards. On a little side trip to Bosnia as well! I didn’t visit any wineries, but wine made fine company for dinners. And so for a week I sampled the local wine with the dishes it was made for.
Rovinj, Istria. Cute little seaside town, winding around a hill with the inevitable church and tower (here to Saint Euphemia). A tourist town, first of many we sampled. We climbed the tower one morning, and it offered 189 terror inducing narrow uneven steps with wide gaps between each, before a final ascent up a ladder. Part way up I nearly decided to quit, my fear whispering in my ear how even a little earthquake would make the stone collapse into rubble. I continued though. Pretty amazing views.
Dinner was seafood, fresh fish and large prawns. Elegant and tasty. Wine? Easy, seemed like a sizable list. But - all Croatian other than a few pointless and pointlessly expensive French options.
My usual suspects - RPWA and Vinous - offered zero articles about Croatian wine. Not a big surprise, perhaps. Croatia is the 32nd largest producer of wine (I later looked that up), exports nearly zero to the US. The reviewers have higher priorities, and rightly so. How was I supposed to separate the average from the great, understand the best producers, or common styles?
With a little waiterly advice we went for a Malvasia. Sharp, nicely balanced local white, reminded me of an aromatic Italian wine, with a bit more savory nose then, say, a Fiano, and with good body. Berserker failure, I didn’t capture the label. A good wine, a real wine, in the 89-90 range maybe.
Pula, just a bit down the coast, made for a wonderful day trip. The gorgeous Roman amphitheater was the highlight, though sipping coffee in front of the little Temple to Augustus and Roma was special. The Adriatic was a Roman lake for most of a millennium or more, and they made high quality wine here as well. Some of the best preserved Roman remains anywhere in the world.
More seafood for dinner, another modest Istrian white (Pošip), selected by a waiter.
When traveling in Italy, I have thousands of wine reviews at my disposal, covering nearly every region. Skimming a few articles I get a quick sense of the local grapes. styles, and producers. Sure, most of the top wines are nowhere to be found (they all seem to be exported to the UK, US, Germany, Belgium, etc.), but there’s plenty of info to help me make choices in restaurants.
Driving from Rovinj to Zadar, took about 6 hours. We stopped in Rijeka, then decided to take the incredibly scenic coastal route (including a long wait for a short ferry ride). We walked around Trsat Castle in Rijeka, and stopped in Senj for a break and walk. This part of the Dalmatian coast is beautiful in a rugged way, and very quiet - almost empty. The towns have minimal interest. I don’t think a lot of tourists (or anybody else) come this way, and understandably so. This is the backwater in between the known, the busy, the developed. Not even many vineyards. If you do pass this way, skip the pizza (though there isn’t much else on offer).
Sampling the wine for a week I wondered if there is any truly great Croatian wine. For a wanderer, a casual traveler, it is impossible to know. I couldn’t find any useful English language guides, so was at the mercy of whim, or whatever local restaurants happened to carry and push. It seems unlikely that the terroir was not hospitable to excellence. What makes great wines? Has expertise just moved elsewhere? Is it the critics and the feedback loops they create? Social consensus? Time and the money to refine, to perfect what terroir and local varieties have to offer? All great wines are crafted by experts, with their highly developed education, skills and knowledge. And an explicit agreement between winemaker, drinker, and critic about what are the characteristics of excellence.
Zadar is a nice town, an old town, with impressive medieval walls and interesting bits here and there. It’s also a tourist town, a little place with a lot of marinas, and crammed full of modern tourist shops and trinkets. The sunsets there were spectacular. But as a visitor I found the ratio of interesting historical areas to tourist schlock out of balance.
After two nights in Zadar we continued on, ever southward, to Split. A little detour to Krka National Park - pretty paths through waterfalls - but hideously overcrowded. Another zigzag to the seaport of Sibenik. Sort of the anti-Zadar, this town is a windy maze of narrow streets, extremely quiet and not yet overrun, with some attractive unpretentious restaurants. Wandering the cobble stone streets I really had the sense of how ancient towns grew at random up hillsides. It’s a sweet spot for lunch. Another fort - the Castello of St. Michael - with amazing views of river and sea and a surprising modern open air theatre. No concerts that day, sadly.
Split - or Spalato - is where the Croatian coast kicks it up a gear or three. It’s large (Croatia’s second biggest city) though the old town center is easily walkable. The historical buildings are astonishing, far beyond anything else we saw in Croatia. The Roman walls and remains of the Palace of Diocletian are awe inspiring. Both quantity and quality are as significant as any outside of Rome or Pompey. The entire old town is a delightful mix of medieval and renaissance buildings, for block after block, lovely but not quite in the league of places like Venice or Florence. It’s a feast for the eyes and mind. It’s also absolutely crawling with tourists, especially during the afternoon when the cruise ships disgorge their hordes. But I can put aside such concerns in the presence of such majestic depths of culture and history. Hard to frown when you can lean on a 3500 year old sphinx (I think Diocletian borrowed a few during a visit to the Nile) and sip the local wine.
The restaurants of Split also stepped up a notch. There are Michelin starred extravaganzas but we dined at the next tier down, offering excellent food without quite so much pomp. We had a delightful Dingač - the 2019 Vicelić. Probably the best wine of the trip, this red had real depth. Good floral aromatics in the nose, red fruited palate on the big and rich side. Could have used some more acid in the finish, but the bit of tannin was just fine with a rich meal.
Quite a few folks in Croatia commented that Dingač produced the best red wines in the country. Most restaurants carried just a few, and of course said theirs were the finest. Maybe. If western reviewers visit the area, they’ll likely start with this small region. The next night we tried a well regarded white wine - a ‘22 Grk from the producer Bire. This is a big rich white, with lemony, savory aromatics and a full body, though with fine balance. My favorite white of the trip, with a Malvasia close behind.
Detouring inland to Bosnia-Herzegovina, we made a one night visit to Mostar. Hard to go from magnificent Split to this little mountain town with its famous bridge. Mini culture shock. Mostar is an unusual city with its half Croatian Catholic/half Bosnian Moslem population. It’s a poor town in a remote spot. Bosnia is not yet an EU member, and the difference between it and Croatia is dramatic. The last 20 years have been kind to the Dalmatian coast, while Europe’s modernizing development has barely reached here. To a huge platter of grilled meats we paired a local Blatina. This was the 2018 Veteribus (old vine?) Blatina Barrique Crveno Suho. Adequate with the meats, but a fairly rustic red.
Dashing back down to the Croatian coast we ended our trip in Dubrovnik. Another masterclass in medieval walls and antique urban planning, this city merits its reputation as a beautiful place to wander. The Game of Thrones hype has brought in vast numbers of tourists, but on an early June day the town absorbed the multitudes handily. I adore this place. There are few cities with their entire defensive walls intact (or as intact as they could be with centuries of enemies battering them down, from the Ottoman Turks to the Serbs just 20 years ago). As capital of the independent kingdom of Ragusa from roughly 1600 to 1800, Dubrovnik had the third largest merchant fleet in the world (after the Dutch and Belgians), and has the maritime history and artifacts to show for it. It’s peak Croatian coast, with Michelin starred restaurants and prices to show for it.
For our last Croatian dinner we found a restaurant with an odd but tasty mix of Middle Eastern cuisines (nary a fish to be found on the menu) and I sampled the 2019 Stina Inspiration Plavac Mali to go with my veal kebabs. Plavac Mali (“little blue” in Croatian) is what we American upstarts call Zinfandel, and is its progenitor. This rich red had those spicy blackberries on the nose, but was more of a mid-weight red than most US Zins I’ve had. A tasty wine.
My wife asked me if I would be shopping for Croatian wines back in California, and was surprised to hear that I was doubtful. There’s the challenge of even finding the stuff, but none of the bottles I sampled were wow moments. Good wines, food friendly. But the wine culture of Croatia has a long way to go to compete for shelf space.
Or maybe I just didn’t have the good stuff. There is something to having the time and focus to visit 20 or 30 wineries in a region and try all their wines. Would be quite a bit of time and effort - almost like a job. But if anyone does it, I hope they write up their notes in detail, and score the wines relative to each other.
The normal not cool was at least until recently the homemade wines, which many produced themselves or knew someone who did. This is Natural wines before that was cool and a term - BUT most times these were clean wines! Depending on the vintage the yields might have been too high if nature was giving. Hence till not too long (and longer in many other places) barrique which picked up later were associate with high quality in peoples mind. So depending on who gives you the advise…