A Mouthful of Wine

A Day in the Golden Valley

Too early in the morning, we’re plucked from our hotel in Dubrovnik and deposited at the small airport for our flight east to Zagreb. Just two hours later, we’re on our way by car to Slavonia, in the southeastern leg of Croatia bounded on three sides by Hungary, Serbia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. We’re chauffered by the cheerful 23-year-old son of the label designer for Vlado Krauthaker in the town of Kutjevo, considered the center of Slavonian winemaking. The scenery here is very different from the coast, where precipitous, rocky slopes slant down to water’s edge and even inland valleys are ringed by craggy mountain ranges. Here there are vast fields of wheat and what looks like rye, and we’re told that much tobacco, too, is grown along this 55km valley with rounded ranges in the distance, which has been called the golden valley (Vallis Aurea) since Roman times. The vineyards are planted on the south slopes of the Krndija and Papuk mountains at 200 to 400 meters elevation. The region produces 80 to 90% white wine, and is known for elegant wines from the grasevina grape, a.k.a. welschriesling. We visit only two producers here, but if one thing stands out to us in this region, it is the commitment to experimentation and development.

Vlado Krauthaker
Our first visit is with Vlado Krauthaker (below), a serious gentleman highly regarded for his leadership in regional winemaking. As we take a bumpy tour of the vineyards by car, we look to the top of the slopes to a Slavonian oak forest, part of a national park and the source of high-quality Slavonian oak barrels. Vlado Krauthaker has 24 hectares of his own, plus 42 within a sort of labor-sharing partnership that doesn’t quite come clear in translation. Seventy percent of his production is grasevina, which likes the hard clay soil. Only 7% of his production is red, but he’s planting more black grapes to achieve 30 to 40%, and is running experiments in conjunction with the university in Zagreb with 26 black grape varieties to determine what works: merlot, syrah, and cab are performing well so far. Many of the vines we see on the hillside are planted at high density in the French style, and we’re told the land is worked by horses. Everything is hand harvested.

We descend to Krauthaker’s airy new tasting rooms, where we’re treated to dozens of wines, some of which have recently become available in the US. First is grasevina three ways:

GRASEVINA 2006 This spent 4 months on its lees with 50% ML. It has a very citrusy lemon-lime and slightly mineral nose; dry, with high acidity and light to medium body. Creamy citrus and herbs dominate the flavor. This is well done, with a nice mouth-feel.
GRASEVINA 2006, half-dry (5.5 g/l RS). This has a less citrusy nose than the dry version, with mineral; it’s off-dry with high acidity and medium body. Medium-intensity pear, lime, and slight melon on the palate. Nice, but I prefer the dry one.
GRASEVINA 2006, a special selection of old vines. This is a slightly darker lemon hue than the two wines above, with a medium-intensity citrus and mineral nose. A slight spritz leads on the palate of this off-dry wine with medium-high acidity to balance the sweetness, and medium-full body. Herbal, lemony, and nicely made.

MANZONI 2005 (riesling x pinot blanc cross, 1964) Vlado Krauthaker is involved in many experiments, including this stainless-steel fermented batch of 2000 to 3000 bottles. The wine is medium gold with medium-intensity honey and creamy lees aromas (it underwent full ML); dry with medium-high acidity and a fairly full body, slight oxidation, honey, and mineral on the palate with a long honey finish. Very interesting.
ZELENAC 2005 Zelenac is rotgipfler, grown only in Slavonia and one village in Austria and made only by Krauthaker in Croatia. This example is slightly off-dry (5 g/l RS) with high acidity, full body, and well balanced alcohol. The palate is very mineral, with white fruit and slight honey. Short to med length; well made and interesting.
CHARDONNAY “Rosenberg” 2005 This spent 8-1/2 months on the lees in oak and was bottled unfiltered. It has oak on the nose, with a slight chemical undernote; dry with medium acidity and body, creamy oak and white fruit on the palate. The length is medium and the wine will develop nicely in the bottle judging from the 2004, which now has hazelnut aromas. This is probably the best chardonnay effort we’ve seen in Croatia.
SAUVIGNON BLANC 2005 Lufthansa selected this wine to serve on their international flights. It’s made with 60% stainless-steel and 40% old-barrique fermentation. A medium lemon-gold in color, this has the intense tropical guava and lemongrass aromas of New World sauvignon blanc, with a short to medium length.

At the end of our tasting—all before lunch—we open a dozen experimental bottles of young pinot noir, which are being monitored for their progress. On our way to the restaurant in town, Vlado points out the cooperative winery where he worked for fourteen years during the Communist period before starting his own operation in 1992. After our enjoyable, light meal we make our way to Ivan Enjingi, whose winery building sits just outside the tiny town of Venje.

Ivan Enjingi
We have been told that Ivan Enjingi (shown below, far right, with his enologists) is a mercurial soul, but perhaps we’ve been immunized by our native habitat of New York—we find a generous, even gregarious man with twinkling eyes and a smooth cap of silvery hair waiting in his private cellar with a feast of cheeses and meats arranged on a barrel top. We sip Enjingi Zweigelt, a red with lovely aromatic herb, bayleaf, and red currant aromas until half of his pair of young enologists, Josipa Andrijanic, arrives. The other (Milan Budinski) joins us as we wander through the fermentation rooms taking samples from the taps. It’s difficult to take notes on the hoof like this, but we taste Enjingi’s dry, late-harvest grasevina, a beautiful late-harvest Rhine riesling, about a dozen experiments and wines in development, and two real stand-outs:

VENJE 2002 Named after the town where Enjingi is based, this is a blend of riesling, pinot gris, welschriesling, sauvignon blanc, and traminac that is made only in favorable years and is matured in barrique. It has medium body and an Old World flavor: slightly oxidized from barrique maturation, very subtle oak, minerals, plus dried pear and white peach. A red version of Venje is in the making, too, a blend of zweigelt, pinot noir, cabernet, merlot, and frankovka.

PINOT CRNI 2000 This curious pinot noir has a heavy spritz in the bottle, and uncharacteristically high alcohol at over 15%, but it is an impressive wine. It is barrique matured and bottled unfiltered, with beetroot, violets, and sweet oak on the nose, plus vanilla, ripe black plums, and blackberries on the palate—medium-bodied with medium length. It’s been seven years since harvest, but I’d be interested to see this in another eight.

After tasting, we drive up the hillside to see the new event space and guest house Ivan has built, which has a lovely view of the town of Venje, the Enjingi vineyards, and the Golden Valley beyond (shown). The building next door is where Enjingi’s barrels are made—he has a team who craft his Slavonian oak barrels in the workshop here. We also examine a machine harvester that Ivan has adapted to suit his particular requirements. Here is a man who makes no apology for doing things his own way, and the results are a startling success. We linger, talking and sipping Enjingi grappa, into the early evening, when we are forced to sadly begin our two-and-a-half-hour drive back to Zagreb and, early tomorrow, our flight to New York.

Highlights of Old Dubrovnik

Old Dubrovnik 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 (shown left) 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 posip—Krajancic’s “Intrada,” possibly the best posip 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 Peljesac—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.