23-07-2025
One hundred and one Dalmatian wines
If the wine world has buried treasure, it's genetic. There are 10,000 identified vine varieties, yet half of the world's vineyards are planted with just 33 of these, and the top 13 'international' varieties account for one-third of plantings. The greatest change in the past half-century has been the flowering of wines from the southern hemisphere. Exciting? In terms of craft and origin, perhaps – but not genetically. They're dominated by those wine-primer varieties: Chard, Cab, Shiraz, Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc.
Where is the buried treasure? In difficult places, notably in central and eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Between the late-19th-century phylloxera era and the border realignments and colour revolutions that began in 1989, those difficulties were not merely physical, but political, economic and social, too. The wine cycle is slow, its chronological units merely annual. Forty years of restitution have yet to pass – but the excitement is growing. Wine-world change over the next half-century may draw deeply on these formerly despised zones. Dalmatia is a test case.
This is the Mediterranean's most intricate archipelago, where the western edge of the Dinaric Alps crumbles into the sea within the present-day borders of Croatia. It's a garden-like assembly of islands and islets, inlaid with the turquoise gifted to quiet, sunlit waters by sea-bottom limestone. My dentist rhapsodised about it to me, drill in hand, 20 years ago; I finally toured it with Croatia's leading wine writer, Saša Špiranec, this June.
Islands, like mountains, are barriers to homogenisation. Such barriers help preserve diversity; Switzerland, too, still works with many varieties lost elsewhere. You can happily ferry yourself from promontory to island to peninsula, up and down this coastline, and find indigenous varieties from each: haunting, sinewy white Grk and the characterful, aromatic white Pošip on the former Venetian island of Korčula; light, zesty white Bogdanuša and Prč on big Hvar; the apricot-scented Vugava on distant Vis; powerful red Dobričić on little Šolta; juicy red Babić and silky red Lasina in Primošten and Skradin on the mainland. Other varieties are pan-Dalmatian, including Plavac Mali, the muscular grape from which many of the most ambitious reds are crafted, and lushly fruity Tribidrag – the local name for Zinfandel (whose original home is here in Croatia). Delicate, faintly bitter white Maraština is found up and down the coast, too. The finest reds of all are found on the Pelješac peninsula, especially from the protected destination of origin zones of Dingač and Postup.
Of course, there are challenges. Serbo-Croat nomenclature terrifies anglophones, particularly when vowels go missing and diacritics flutter like confetti. Eschew caution and blurt: once learned, the sounds themselves are not difficult. Dalmatia is lucky to have so many fragrant, quenching whites in its pocket, as they sing with the coastline's cornucopia of fish and seafood. Plavac Mali and Tribidrag reds, by contrast, are archetypical winter wines. The almost daunting power and force of a great Dingač red, made from Plavac Mali, rivals similarly contoured reds from Châteauneuf du Pape, Priorat or the Douro. If you get a glimpse of its steep, sea-fronted vine terraces – a furnace on a summer afternoon – this style seems inevitable and tastes precious, though it's fighting the new skinny-wine zeitgeist.
A final hazard is that much of Croatia's wine is family-made and for personal use, and if you bump into wines like these (a possibility in small restaurants), their imperfections may be evident. It's worth seeking out bottled wines from the best producers – such as Antičević, Bedalov, Bire, Carić, Kiridžija, Korta Katarina, Krajančić, Marlais, Miloš, Rizman, Saints Hills, Stina, Tomić and Zure, to name just a few.
Stories of this sort are underway at multiple points east of Venice and Palermo; indeed, coastal Istria and inland Croatia has as much again to offer (as, to be fair, does Italy). The dictatorship of the familiar stops here.
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