 I'm Matthew Horkey 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 retour 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. It's only a 15-minute ferry ride from the island of Cortula to the Pelješáts Peninsula. It's a slender sliver of land jutting out into the Adriatic Sea. I have to stay vigilant with you on this road. It's crazy how many weird things there are on the road. A two-lane road runs along the spine of the peninsula. There are towering mountains, hidden coves, and steep vineyards to be seen. Most of the vineyards on the peninsula consist of Plovac Mali. It's Croatia's beloved red grape and it's known for making massive red wines with big tannins. One producer that's learned to tame these big tannins is Miloš. They produce some of the most sought-after examples of Plovac Mali in Croatia. Their top red wine, Stagnum, is a must try for hardcore wine nerds. The tasting room is always busy and today Ivan Miloš meets up with us to taste their vintages. As usual, all the wines show well, including a brand new unreleased white wine made from rucatats. It's perfect wine. How good is it? It's very, very, very good. I want it. Ivan's father, Frano, joins us for a few minutes before we start the vineyard tour. All the vineyards of Miloš are in the village of Ponicve. There are an impossibly steep slopes. Ivan gives us some of his time to explain Plovac Mali and their vineyard practice. My family lives in this village of Ponicve over there for almost 500 years. My father was the first one in this area who founded a family-owned wine, one of the first in one of the first seven in Croatia. So the Plovac Mali grape is a really unique grape. This is the grape which can give you the best one or even the worst wine ever. So you need to have like, you need to plant it on just a few locations where it can really grow. It's really like a grape which can suffer a lot, but still if the conditions are not perfect for it, it will be like such a bad quality. It's a grape which is well known for the high tenon, but still if you have the tenon management, if you make it round and soft after a little bit more aging, it can be a really big classic wine. So we grow just this one location here. So the soil is very unique with lots of telemetic limestone, lots of sandy soil. Most of the vineyards are ungraphed. It's also very interesting. We are also practicing 100% organic and also all of our wines we do completely natural style. So it means we do always native fermentation, we don't filter wines. So we really want to keep them as unique as they are. Our final goal is to make the wine which is like really good. We are trying to make the best what we can from this area. Doing organic and natural just help us to get it to that final goal actually. So you can't use any machinery to cut a weed, to do the weed management. So you need to do it by hand. So that's very labor intensive. So we spend much more time doing the weed control than doing the harvesting and pruning all together. We wish we could stay here all day, but we have much more ground to cover. Our next stop is Makalaburra winery in the village of Potomye. Maria and Murgadish in her family produce one of the most legendary wines in Croatia, the Burra Dingach. Their humble cellar also consists of artwork by Maria's daughter. After a quick tour, we start opening bottles. The entry level Burra Galleria is a blend of Plavacemali, Kevenme, Seminyan and Marcela that take shreen by surprise. I think this wine really reflects where it comes from. It's so important when you drink it, you know where it comes from. You taste the late ripening fruit. There's no mystic at all, but there's a sense of like rustic, rusticity in it that you get and and then you smell the plavats on the nose. You smell the warm weather and I love it. The Murgadish family make iconic wines from both Postup and Dingach. They're regarded as two of the prime vineyard sites for Plavacemali and Maria talks about the differences. Dingach is slope around 40 to 60 degrees to the sea and Postup is around 40 degrees. The grape is Plavacemali, 100% in Dingach, 100% in Postup. In Dingach we harvest in 30% of dry grapes, but in Postup it's around 15 to 20. Maria's son Borus joins us and opens the family's premium wines, including the Benmos family Dingach, Mardi Postup and Buda Dingach. The latter is one of the top and rarest red wines in Croatia. However, today it's the Borah sweet wine that takes charine by surprise. Potomye is the gateway to the vineyards of Dingach. In the past growers had to use donkeys to take harvested grapes over the steep mountain ridge to the cooperative winery. In 1973 the cooperative paid for a tunnel making transport of the grapes easier. Passing through this one lane road gives way to spectacular scenery. Dingach is Croatia's first ever appellation. It was actually established in 1961 when Croatia was part of Yugoslavia and you can see by the steep vineyards some of these vineyards go up to 60 degrees in incline. They rival some of the most beautiful vineyards in the entire world. In the morning we had a Corta Caterina winery. It was started by Americans Penny and Lee Anderson who came to Dalmatia and helped displace people during the Balkan wars. They fell in love with the area and decided to start a winery. Today we're visiting our friend, director Evo Sibilic. After tasting a few barrel samples we find that Corta Caterina has prepared a tasting lunch for us. Corta Caterina produces one of the best potions in the country and they also happen to make a sparkling potion. It goes great with the local shellfish. Oh it's fish. I like it when you unwrap it and you're not in all the aromas just engulf your face. We have an ice cream cake with croquant hazelnut, some hazelnuts, white chocolate and homemade pralines with hazelnut. The team also opens a few older vintages of the winery's top bottling, the Rubens Private Reserve Plovets Mali, which tastes like Bordeaux on steroids. Evo also tells us about the grand opening of the hotel, which unfortunately we're going to miss out on. I guess there's always next time. This summer we will open a very exclusive villa that will be only for 20 people, not more, and that will be something completely different to everything else that you will find in the area. Later in the afternoon we stop by Peninsula Wine Bar. They carry a wide selection of wines from producers on and around Pella Shots. We hold this shop near and dear to our hearts. When we first started the research process for our book Cracking Croatian Wine, we stopped in here and the owners opened around 30 wines for us to taste and a win. They carry a number of exciting wines from producers like Crige, St. Hill's, Gurgic, Rosic, Scaramuzza and Milicic. It's been a long day, so we head back to our place to get some rest. Stone and Mali Stone are home to the largest fortification walls in Europe. These were once used to protect the lots of local salt production. Today they make a popular visitor attraction, in addition to the local bays, which are perfect for farming oysters and mussels. We have no time to stop though, we're heading south to the city of Dubrovnik, the pearl of the Adriatic. This well preserved walled city is one of the sets in the popular show Game of Thrones. The city is beautiful but always crowded in the summer. Today we're stopping at one of the city's most famous restaurants, Proto. Proto actually is standing here as a restaurant since 1886. It's one of the rare settings which is actually made to be a restaurant. This terrace where we are sitting is very exclusive. It's vast, that means it has a beautiful atmosphere as it's located right in the center of the old city. Well, all our ingredients are locally sourced. This is very, very important for us. We also have a supplier in the Marlestone Bay for the famous oysters. This is a flat European oyster which is exclusively on our beautiful planet, still living and being farmed only in this Marlestone Bay, which is one hour drive from here. It's called Ostraia Dulles. Unfortunately, it died everywhere else in the Mediterranean where it was living. But somehow as we have a very clean sea, it survives here. The restaurant also employs one of the top sommeliers in Croatia, Senisha Larsen. He stops by and offers us some wine that he produces with some of the top winemakers throughout the country. But at Proto, it's really about the fish. Very special oven, which is Italian made. You just taste like subtle burst of flavor. It's not typical grilled fish. I mean, I got a little bit of olive. I got a little bit of dried up taste with it too. Typically, the fish that I get from Croatia, I expect it to be really simple, grilled, baked, some salt, pepper, olive oil. But for this, I somehow taste like patches of like olive. I don't know if it's, is it rosemary or thyme that you put in here too? Yeah, you just get like little patches of different flavor and I like that. After the fish, aloe dessert, and we are stuffed. Because of its natural beauty and popularity, we highly recommend visiting Dubrovnik outside of July and August. We return to Pelje shots for our last visit with Carigia. Vedrin Carigia is one of the old guards on the peninsula. He makes traditional plavets Mali from a small garage with little to no technology. Vedrin's top wines are as dinghets and contra-bottlings. But today, his plavets Taiano is really impressing Shireen. The nose is just really beautiful, vibrant, grapefruit. But what's amazing is it's almost silky for, come on, for a plavets Mali blend. After we taste the newest vintages, Vedrin has a little surprise for us. This is from Dubrovnik Republic. He takes us back to his cellar and we open an older bottle from one of Vedrin's favorite vintages. My son was born in 97, now in Zagreb. Zagreb student in Zagreb. The 2008 Carigia dinghach is captivatingly beautiful. Ten years old wine, dinghach, my wine, my dinghach, ten years old, is the best. This is so beautiful. I start to cry when I drink it. I'm too happy. This is our standing plavetable, our standing dinghach. This is fantastic. I don't stop drinking this wine. The dinghach is dinghach. Carigia only makes 15,000 bottles of wine per year, so if you see it in the shop or on the wine list, it's worth checking out. In the next episode, we'll take you to Mainland Dalmatia and introduce the Croatian wine grapes Zlatarica, Babic, Debe, Marastina, and Lasina. When in Mainland Dalmatia, the unique cuisine of Neretva is a highlight that you shouldn't miss. What did you say? I'm not leaving a drop of this. I'm going to drink it all. If you would like to learn more about Croatian and Croatian wine, keep a lookout for our next episode and check out our book Cracking Croatian Wine.