This bottle was picked up while in Zagreb at the Wine Weekend. While Antunović wasn’t present (this bottle is from the almighty & glorious, Vrutak), it’s always interesting to taste a Postup wine as they vary a good deal in character and there weren’t a tremendous amount of them at the wine fair.

What Mato Antunović is making down in the village of Oskorušno is the type of Postup that is more food friendly. With a strong brace of acidity, it really wants to be paired with a dish. It does open up a decent amount with time, but it’s more generally reserved and lighter than other Postups I’ve had.

Still, a good deep wine made from the Plavac Mali grape that, these days in Croatia is a decent price for the region.

While we’re still in the midst of and nearly completed with our new Empordà-Costa Brava wine travel guide, we’ve also picked up a large number of tasting samples from from the Zagreb wine fair. We’ll be putting up tasting notes as well as rundowns of Croatian wine comparisons like “Zlatan Plenković, Entry vs. Top End”, “Crljenak Showdown”, and “Borgonja: It ain’t in France”. With four cases that all made it back safe and sound due to our “patented” traveling with wine system, there’s a lot to get through. We’ll also be putting some time in to an update of our Dalmatia wine travel guide, so keep an eye out for all of this. Delicious times to come from Vinologue HQ!

Bonus points and a round on us in Barcelona to whomever can name the most wines in that photo above. And yes, you would be right if you were to say that a number of them are from Trapan. But, there is also one in that group that isn’t from Croatia.

After Mr. Bibich’s Friday night pouring, there was another winemaker tasting event at Apetit, on Saturday. I almost didn’t go as I was, well, rather “soft” after Friday night and had missed a number of the talks on Saturday which I had meant to attend such as the Twitter tasting. Thankfully, due to the restorative powers of Jana spring water and Croatian coffee (to be honest, probably mostly the coffee) I managed to make it to this Saturday night tasting. Afterwards, I was very thankful I had.

The tasting was from Piquentum’s line of wines and was hosted by Brava Wine along with some additional bottles tossed out by Blue Danube Wine. For those who haven’t yet heard of it, Piquentum, it’s the winery of Dimitri Brečević (the fellow at the right), a French-Croatian winemaker with a wealth of experience in the French wine industry that he’s now applying to Istria while still staying true to the qualities of Istrian grapes that make them so unique. All the while, he’s producing natural wines. You can read a great interview with Dimitri by Goran Zgrablić here or April Torzewski’s account of visiting (and loving) the winery last year. We’ll definitely have to check out this re-purposed Italian water cistern wine cellar soon.

Obviously, if I’m bothering to push pixels about these wines, you’d be right to assume that they’re excellent. Malvazija (or Istarska Malvazija to distinguish it from Malvasia in Konavle) is more often than not a wine I respect than favor for my palate. This is the case with Dimitri’s Blanc 2010 in that I find it to be a most fantastically crafted wine. It has a tiny bit of minerality to the nose with a highly structured body. It’s clean in the finish and pulls out everything from the palate. For those who like Californian Chardonnays, but want it to have more character, be more food friendly and just generally more awesome, this is the wine for you. As it decants, I find that there is a slight honey and lavender aspect that comes out of it as well.

The Terre is the red, which if memory serves (as, for some reason, the notes don’t…) is a blend of Terran and Refošk. It’s earthy and deliberate in how it is wet on the palate and harking for food pairings of pasta, boar, steak, and just about anything else delicious from Istria–perhaps even truffle? One of the aspects that I appreciated more than anything was that this bottle, while plenty earthy and deep doesn’t drift in to the “rusty” character that I find Terran can sometimes flirt with.

I have to admit that I actually didn’t go through the tastings in exactly the same order as everyone else though as right after the white was poured, I popped off to Bistro Mitnica (known locally as “kod srbina”) in Črnomerec was a heaping pile of delicious meats. Once I returned, everyone was working their way through some of the other bottles that Frank of Blue Danube brought. The one that was the most amusing was a bottle of Ridge Zinfandel 1999 from California that clocked in at an “official” 16.7% alcohol. For some, it was just too much and they were pouring off their glass to happily return to Dimitri’s Terre.

Having grown up on these types of wines, I’ll always have a special spot on my palate for them, but I completely admit that they’re terrible for food pairings and if you’re not ready for them, they can be far, far too strong. Also, you simple can’t mix Old and New World wines in one sitting. It would be like having wild boar and farm-raised steak in the same meal. They’re both the same basic thing in the end, but they’re worlds apart from one another.

Otherwise, it was a splendid (and for some, a much more sane) evening spend with a great cast of wine folks from the festival. Some of this gang you’ll be hearing more about on this site, so stay tuned and top off your glass if you haven’t already.

And it lands. In preparation for the April 23rd airing of No Reservations: Croatian Coast, Anthony Bourdain and company have expanded their Croatian episode page a great deal. Based upon their visit from back in October of last year, they’ve posted videos of truffle hunting, tuna fishing, the future of Croatian cuisine, and our personal favorite, “holy shit is that good“. But, for Croatian wine fans, the real cherry on top of the sundae is the interview with Alen Bibich.

Go have a view, or if you don’t wish to spoil your appetite, wait for the episode to air next week. We’re just coming off a huge Alen love-fest this week, so it was a welcome bit to come across this today.

For those visiting the Dalmatian Coast, you will often hear the term “Balkan Hospitality” bandied about. Once seeing the Jägermeister shot tents, expensive hotels, and the menus at restaurants printed in all languages except that of good food, you might wonder, “Where is the so-called hospitality in this?” It’s still there, you just need to back away from the water a good 10km (maybe more in July & August) to find it. Venture further inland and you’ll still find it in great abundance, especially in Continental Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia. Admittedly, outside the May-September boom time on the coast, it comes back there as well.

Balkan Hospitality can basically be surmised as, “host your guests as you would yourself be hosted”. Once you know people in the region, you understand what it is and how this culture, born of being a crossroads for Europe, is infectious, genuine, and dare I say, one step towards world peace–if only everyone ascribed to it. Alen Bibich and his wines are the embodiment of this.

I don’t know how Alen (no, not Alan, Anglophones) and his right-hand man Šime managed to make as much time for everyone as they did for the festival last weekend. But somehow they welcomed everyone to their table to share in their wines and then to a really fantastic party at Apetit one night.

Host your guests as you would yourself be hosted, which meant making sure that glasses were never empty and full of any one of Alen’s amazing high-end wines such as the Lučica or his new Bas de Bas in both white and red. While the later are high-ticket, they are the penultimate embodiment of Alen’s wine philosophy where he focuses on native grapes such as Debit for the Bas de Bas white. Or, his love of Syrah that you see in the Bas de Bas red which shows that it is quite a happy grape in Dalmatia. The wines open up with time and others around you.

But, it’s the structure of all the wines that makes them so impressive in how they ascribe to this model of hospitality. When I first met Alen he claimed that you could drink both his reds and whites, pretty much all day long. Last Friday we found out that that was indeed true. They’re wine for company and they’re wine for meals. They’re meant to hang around as long as your company wishes too. You simply can’t do this with the huge alcohol wines of California.

A well-known and respected enolog in Spain once told me that a good wine is: 1/3 vineyard, 1/3 cellar, and 1/3 marketing. I think you can easily scratch that last third and substitute it with 1/3 hospitality. As an example to this, yes, I could be paid to write 500 words about a wine, breaking down its virtues and what it means to me. But, invite me to taste what it is you make and host me as you would like to be hosted when visiting me, I’ll write about said wine purely as a gracious return in hospitality.

Alen, I think a great many of us who attended Zagreb Wine Gourmet Weekend would like to thank you for opening up your wines and hosting us.

Note that the header photo is actually from a tasting that happened the next night, which also deserves being written about.