This year’s entrance fee hike from 150 to 200 kuna did not prevent thousands of enthusiasts from flocking to the Esplanade.
This past Friday and Saturday Zagreb’s Esplanade Hotel hosted the VINOcom 2017 wine festival, one of the most important and certainly most popular Zagreb wine events, surpassing its own attendance records each year. This year’s entrance fee hike from 150 to 200 kuna did not prevent thousands of enthusiasts from flocking to the Esplanade for wine tastings and workshops. On the contrary, it seems the price raise filtered the audience, which seemed to be more focused on the wines themselves this year. VINOcom included around 200 presenters with new and best harvests and labels, among them nearly all relevant Croatian and regional winemakers presenting their wines in person. The gastronomy programme was never a strong suit of VINOcom.
The Emerald Hall saw the presentation of the new harvest of super popular Badel Korlat Boutique, arriving to the market with 15 thousand bottles, the Korlat Merlot 2014 and Sauvignon 2016 by the Daruvar winery. Quite a large crowd formed around the Tomac winery stall, over their rare Rose which Tomislav Tomac cited as still being in a test phase. An expected strong interest was evoked by the new Graševinas of Ilok Cellars and Kutjevo, while the biggest Istrian hits with the audience were Benvenuti’s Malvazija 2016 and Radovan’s Sauvignon. The Duboković winery presented their Plavac Mali and the Terra Madre label. From the beginning the VINOcom festival, created by professor Ivan Dropuljić, is an authentic phenomenon of the Croatian wine scene. Excellent organisation, cheerful atmosphere and enthusiasm of presenters with truly attractive workshops are key factors for the long life of this manifestation.
Among the workshops we would single out a vertical tasting of Chateau Latour from 2004 to 2008, then a workshop devoted to Taittinger where attendees could taste the white and rose Comtes de Champagne, then the tasting of a respected Bordeaux producer Gruaud-Larose, whose vertical stretches all the way back to 1979, as well as domestic workshops with Tomac’s amphorae wines, meeting the Krauthaker archive and the Feravino panel on Frankovka.
Translated from Plava Kamenica.
