October the 10th, 2026 – A Croatian company has launched the world’s largest wine map, with articles about it having been published by media outlets worldwide.
Articles about the project have been published in more than 25 countries, from the USA, Italy and Spain all the way to Brazil, South Africa, India and New Zealand. Sinisa Malus reports for Poslovni that the Croatian company M.G. Solutions from Umag has launched WorldWineryMap.com, the most comprehensive digital archive of world viticulture to date. On a single interactive map more than 4.3 million vineyards and more than 100 thousand wineries in 90 countries of the world have been precisely plotted, including more than 53 thousand Croatian vineyards.
For every vineyard on the map the altitude, slope, soil and climate are shown, and wine regions and areas are plotted according to official boundaries, from Burgundy and Napa to Istria. The innovativeness of the World Winery Map at the global level is also confirmed by the enormous interest of foreign media.
four million business polygons
“For every parcel we extracted exact coordinates and calculated altitude, slope and exposure using the Copernicus GLO-30 satellite terrain model, and then we added climate data to that. For larger parcels we measure up to 16 control points, which is why altitude is shown as a precise range and not as a single number. Where data was available, we also calculated solar radiation, precipitation, wind, soil type and geology. In total, more than four million spatial polygons had to be processed. All these data are extremely important because today they mathematically prove how climate change is irreversibly changing the world’s wine map. They reveal the true truth about every vineyard, but also help predict the future,” emphasises Matija Gavrilović, founder of the platform.
Gavrilović is an expert in marketing, PR and business consulting, with almost twenty years of experience in sales and marketing.
There are currently 98,719 boundaries on the map, from large regions to individual named sites. Of these, 2,815 are wine regions, sub-regions and appellations, and 95,904 are named vineyard sites. The boundaries of wine regions around the world have been taken from laws and state services, and for Croatia from the Ordinance on Viticulture (Official Gazette 81/2022).
In Croatia, four regions, twelve sub-regions and 72 vineyard areas have been plotted, and the map also includes 680 Croatian wineries. The integrated geolocation system enables users to instantly find nearby wineries and receive directions to the estate, no matter where they are in the world. Something like this is certainly interesting given the declining Croatian wine production. Domestic production in 2025 amounted to 699 thousand hectolitres, or a little less than 70 million litres of wine. That was a growth of 15.9 percent compared to the climatically catastrophic 2024, when production fell below 50 million litres, to the lowest level in Croatian history. Croatian winemaking is currently going through one of its most challenging periods. Many producers are struggling with rising costs, falling consumption and increasingly strong competition.
The shortage of Croatia’s wine production is being substituted by increased imports. Croatia imports another 30 million litres on top of the less than 70 million litres of its own production, even though it has the conditions for significantly higher production. On the National List of Recognised Vine Cultivars we have 258 varieties, of which as many as 134 are autochthonous, and we once counted more than four hundred of them. In intensive cultivation today we have about twenty. Half of the leading varieties in Croatia are made up of the three most important ones – Plavac Mali, Graševina and Istrian Malvasia – and Graševina alone accounts for about 44 percent of total wine turnover on the domestic market.
istria reigns
According to data from the Vineyard Register, on the last day of 2025 there were a total of 16,399 hectares under vineyards in Croatia, and a quarter was occupied by Graševina with 4,212 hectares. Looking by counties, the largest areas under vineyards are in Istria County, where there are 2,733 hectares, followed by Osijek-Baranja with 2,051 hectares and Dubrovnik-Neretva with 1,711 hectares. The largest number of agricultural holdings that hold vineyards is in Krapina-Zagorje County, where there are 4,130 of them.
