 Hello, hello, hello, I'm Matthew Horky and I'm Sherin Tan. Together we are Exotic Wine Travel. We've spent the last three years traveling around the world writing and speaking about unique and exciting wines. Our journey has taken us to both lesser known and established wine regions. In 2016, we came to Croatia for the first time. We fell in love with the country and the wines, prompting us to write the book Cracking Croatian Wine, a visitor-friendly guide. Now we're at it again. We're going to re-tour the country and bring our book to life. We aim to take you deep into the Croatian food and wine scene. So sit back, relax, and join us as we go Cracking Croatian Wine! The first stop on a re-tour of Croatia? Plesovica. It's a small wine region close to the capital. It's a wonderful area for wine that even local enthusiasts tend to forget about. It's only a 30-minute drive from the capital, but Plesovica is a fantastic wine region. A lot of people that come to Zagreb just speed past and head through the coast. But as you can see here, the vineyards are really steep. There's about a thousand hectares of vineyards. There's about four to five really high quality producers making fantastic wine. And we really believe that Plesovica has unlimited potential in terms of Croatian wine. Our first appointment is with Ivinčić. It's a small winery headed up by winemaker and proprietor Kresimir Ivinčić. He's made a name for himself by producing sparkling wines with pure fruit flavors in low levels of the brioche notes that can be found in Champagne. He's also a local champion of the red grape Portugiesa. The red sparkling wine dark side is made from the grape and it's something that we highly recommend. Kresimir greets us with a few new vintages and a large plate of home-cured meats. After enjoying his new Sauvignon Blanc, we head straight for a steepest vineyard. Kresimir has told us about this before, but it's even steeper than we imagined. Come on, you can do it. If my mother can do it every second day, then you can do it also. Portugiesa is a variety that's usually made in a fresh Beaujolais Novo style wine, but Kresimir makes more serious wine out of it. Why did you choose to work and focus on Portugiesa? I didn't choose because it was there. Yeah, 100 years ago, my grandfather's father put it in the soil, so now we have it. So what do you like most about working with Portugiesa and what do you like least about working with it? Look, the best is that Portugiesa is very fruity and fresh and because of that, it's very hard to preserve that. So when you do that properly, you have like very, very good sparkling wine base. So this is like great and perfect. Some mutual friends join us and the party starts. The evening's filled with wine, laughter and homemade pork and mushroom sauce. The party rages on until 3 a.m. We open lots of wines. Somehow we managed to get to our accommodation, Reshikov Podrum, a small guest house that looks unassuming from the outside, yet boasts beautiful views of the vineyards below. We're up till 3 a.m., so that's what happens when you're in Croatia. I'm struggling this morning. How are you feeling? I'm never struggling. How's breakfast? I haven't eaten yet. No, it's good there. The coffee is good. It's just a simple snack to keep you. After breakfast, we head down a single-track dirt road to Šember winery. They're known for making some of the best-valued sparklers in Croatia. It's Labor Day when we arrive, but the whole family is working. They're installing an automatic riddling machine for sparkling wine and doing a little spring cleaning. Nikola Šember makes wine with his father, Sedenko Šember. He's kind enough to take some time out of his busy day to show off a new release. This is our first vintage sparkling wine, named Pavel, and the name Pavel became our village. Your name is Pavel Čani, and it became from Saint Pavel. It's made by Šadrne, 90%, and Plavizhutti, 10%. Šember also makes energetic dry reisling and fruity Pinot Noir. Nikola shows us where the fruit for these wines come from before we leave the family to their work. We move down the road to Tomats. The winery is regarded as one of Croatia's finest. Tomaslav Tomats produces several sparkling wines in addition to earthy Pinot Noirs, and a few wines made in Georgian Quaverie, aka Amfora. His Amfora sparkling wine was named into Cancer magazine as one of the top 75 buys of 2016. His Tomats Amfora still wine is also something that we highly recommend. This spring Tomaslav is busy in the vineyards, but gives us a few minutes of his time to talk about his sparkling and Amfora wines. We didn't know when we started. It was like 25 years ago that we had a good opportunity to make the good sparkling wines. Then we started to research and it was logical because if you compare it with Champagne, which is the leader in the sparkling world, then there are some similar things like climate. But we are not so known, but we are not enough to have a good ripening of the grapes, especially when we use standard varieties, which are typical for this area, like Jutiplavets. And then the soil is also in this style of carbonic soil, a lot of free calcium, so it's important for aromatic profile of the wine. So from this year we are starting with the bid dynamical production and I think that we will improve much more. And it's always good when you have a passion for new horizons and new stories. And why did you decide to start using Amfora? The first vintage was 2007 and the first results were impressive for me. And now when I'm drinking this wine after 11 years, I saw what is a good thing about Amfora. Amfora is not a magic box and today a lot of wine makers will take the Amfora or something like that just to be in trend, to have some marketing about this, some stories. But you have to you have to know that if you put the good grapes in Amfora, then you will get a really good wine. If you just put the some standard conventional grape, then the wine will be disaster. Usually when we visit Thomas, we spend a few hours tasting, but today Thomas Love and his wife Martina are busy, so we move on. Our tummies are rumbling, so we stop at Evenchich restaurant. It's one of the few salad restaurants in the region, in addition to Carlo. Evenchich sits in the center of the village of Plesovica and has beautiful panoramic views of the region. Just note it does not share ownership with Evenchich wine. The local special of the day is forest mushroom soup and venison stew with a homemade dumpling. Both dishes get a thumbs up from Shireen. We polish off both dishes in no time flat before catching an early night's rest. In the morning we head to another Croatian wine-drem, Korak winery. Josep Korak makes wines with his father Velomir. They're building a full-time restaurant that will open at the end of 2018. Despite the construction, Josep welcomes us onto the terrace where we taste a few new vintages. Korak makes outstanding Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling and Chardonnay in addition to sparkling wine. However, the new vintage of Pinot Noir is what gets us really excited. I like this because on the nose you get a little bit of that brown sugar sweetness, very vibrant fruit as well, definitely led by vibrant grapefruit, but you still get a little bit of the darkness, maybe black cherry, a little bit just a little bit of earthy notes, but it's still pure fruit. And then in the mouth that I'm most impressed with is the structure and that small tannins. It doesn't grip, it just finishes and it just like, you feel it in your mouth a little bit and the structure is just brilliant, big in the mid-palette, finishes really clean. Josep, thank you for hosting us today, Giverly. Cheers. Cheers. Well, we always like your Sauvignon Blanc, your Chardonnay, your sparkling as one, Riesling, and we always believe that you make excellent white wines at Korak, but as we were talking about it earlier, you mentioned that you think Pinot Noir should be your flagship wine. Can you tell me why? Yeah, in the past when you mentioned Plashevitz, first it's a white variety and it's like that because 70% in vineyards is white variety, 30% is red. And Pinot Noir is not such old variety in this region, but before it's Portugese and the last 15-20 years is Pinot Noir. And I think when you mention Pinot, when you say Pinot Noir in Croatian, first region you remember is Plashevitz. First year is what we produced, Pinot is 2006. We have a lot of good stuff, some bad, but that's for us competition with variety. Do you think you've achieved the Pinot Noir that you more or less want to achieve? Yeah, our style it's maybe more old school, like for Pinot, like in Chardonnay and some different in other variety, our philosophy is maturing with low sulfur, without sulfur. We ageing Pinot wine year without sulfur on the lease and in wood. You don't use new oak, more second rotation, third rotation and after that in big oak because we want to leave with this fruity aroma from Pinot and elegance, no wood and up. Walking through the cellar, Yosep shows us the new vintage of Riesling, which he made into orange wine. Man, we could stay here all day. What year is this again? 2015. Unfortunately, our time in the region is running out. So our time in Plesovica has run up. When Shireen and I here, we always amazed how beautiful the region is. We'd always like to spend a lot more time here, but now it's time to move on to Istria. In the next episode of exotic wine travel, we will explore Istria, a peninsula surrounded on three sides by the Adriatic Sea and bounded by the Elbs on the north. In Istria, the towns, food and wine take on a strong Italian influence. If you'd like to learn more about Croatia and Croatian wine, keep a lookout for our next episode and check out our book Cracking Croatian Wine, A Visitor-Friendly Guide.