“This horseshoe-shaped nation doesn’t just produce good wines, but potentially great ones, and the wine world at large has yet to recognise this.”
He is one of the great promoters of Croatian wine and its winemakers, and leading Croatian wine writer Sasa Spiranec has continued his work in spreading news about Croatian wine excellence through a recent collaboration with the Financial Times on a recent tour of the wine regions of Croatia, which the newspaper reported on on August 30, 2019. The article, entitles Croatia’s Best Wines by Andrew Jefford can be read here.
The tour took in top wineries in Istria, Dalmatia, Slavonia and the Zagreb region, exposing Jefford to the full variety of the Croatian wine story. He allocated the most column inches for arguably Croatia’s most interesting winemaker in recent years, Jo Ahearne MW on Hvar. The first Master of Wine to make wine in Croatia having moved to the sunshine island from London, Ahearne’s use of indigenous Dalmatian grapes has attracted international acclaim, as well as customers as far away as Japan and Australia, but my favourite part of the article is the effect she is having on some much closer to her adopted home.
The Ahearne wines are outstanding and intricately crafted — yet true to their distinctive Croatian origins. “I was showing my wines at a festival in Split,” she recalled, “and a very glamorous woman came to taste. When she tasted my Wild Skins [a blend of Kuč, Bogdanuša and Pošip, made with skin contact], she had tears in her eyes. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘You are not Dalmatian; you’re not even Croatian — but when I taste this wine I remember all the aromas I smelled when I used to walk in the hillside with my grandfather when I was little.’ It was one of the nicest things anyone has ever said to me.”
To learn more about Croatian wine, check out the Total Croatia Wine introductory guide.
