Year 2011 in terms of wines of Lum­barda won’t probaly be remem­bered only as an excep­tional vin­tage year, but also as year of rebrand­ing for almost a half of the top local wine pro­duc­ers. In that sense last Dal­ma­tia wine expo was an occa­sion where Bire and Popić showed their new labels and bot­tles, while for the last big wine event in Croa­tia, 6th Zagreb Inter­na­tional Fes­ti­val of wine and Culi­nary Art Maja and Bra­n­imir Cebalo came with new look of their already very rec­og­niz­able Alzace style Grk bot­tle.
Almost every­one who ever encoun­tered a bot­tle of Grk wine, could hardly miss the label with an old stone gate and small tag attached to the top of the bot­tle.  Once called Grk Bra­n­imir, today sim­ply Grk Cebalo due to it’s longevity became almost a syn­onim for the Grk wine. Today two decades after it’s first appearence on the broader Croa­t­ian mar­ket, came a moment for a lit­tle facelift­ing and accord­ing to what is seen it’s done very suc­cess­fuly, with full respect of mod­ern demands and no harm to tra­di­tional traits. Shape of the bot­tle remained the same but te old gate on the pic­ture received a new fresh look. Pre­vi­ously col­ored inside with tex­ture of sea and sun, today’s walls and enter­ance in white and grey stone show trans­parency in the mid­dle and give an insight to the con­tent in the same man­ner that this  real life enter­ance gives acces to Cebalo’s vine­yard.  To the point!    Author?!  Tonka Lujanac. Mar­ket­ing spe­cial­ist, designer, entre­pre­neur, restau­rant owner, native from Lum­barda and also the author of another nice Grk label.  Con­grat­u­la­tions for the work, for more than twenty years tra­di­tion and most of all for con­sis­tency in qual­ity of this prod­uct. Not to for­get that Cebalo’s Plavac while in Bor­deaux style bot­tle  also fol­lowed the path.

“Eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of this eleventh day of the eleventh month…” In wine world that can be only one thing: offi­cial start of St. Mar­tin fes­ti­val.  St Mar­tin in Croa­tia is mainly cel­e­brated and almost always fol­lowed by medias in con­ti­nen­tal Croa­tia, where this tra­di­tion is lit­tle bit more entrenched than in other regions of this very diverse wine coun­try. How­ever, this time from not so much con­ti­nen­tal Croa­tia, or more pre­cisely one island known as Kor­cula have very sound rea­son to cel­e­brate St. Mar­tin at least as loudly. Har­vest sea­son 2011. shows excel­lent first results, and now we know it offi­cially from the wine­mak­ers and sev­eral other peo­ple who had occa­sion to bring first sam­ples of Grk and Plavac Mali on local gath­er­ing in Lum­barda and where they exchanged first impres­sions . Speak­ing about impres­sions they go as fol­lows: young Grk wine and Plavac Mali are already in this early phase very aro­matic, show­ing nice char­ac­ter, col­ors and bal­ance that can go so far to pre­dict one of the best har­vests in recent his­tory. Cause of all this was pretty dry Sum­mer, with no tem­per­a­ture imbal­ances, good har­vest tim­ing, grapes always picked by hand, and mod­est yield of 1 to 1,5kg per vine which is reg­u­larly fol­lowed by excep­tional juice and high qual­ity raw mate­r­ial for fur­ther vini­fi­ca­tion.
Since one pic­ture says more than a thou­sand words, all can be seen from the expres­sions on faces from the main wine peo­ple from Lum­barda and alco­hol blurred vision of the pho­tog­ra­pher. From left to right: Bar­tul Zure, Bra­n­imir Cebalo, Stjepan i Dinka Cebalo, Maja Cebalo, Višnja i Frano Bire, Per­ica Žuvela (enol­o­gist), Renci Milina, Đani Batis­tić, Zoran Cebalo and Ivan Zure.
click on photo to enlarge

Four stom­achs, eight hands, love for wine and food gar­nished with social net­work­ing and blog­ging, that what Taste of Croa­tia team is about. Of course there is much more to that short descrip­tion and just to men­tion that the four mem­ber team is very active these days when most of the peo­ple is not doing much of the hard work while being on sum­mer hol­i­days. There­fore Morana just vis­ited Lum­barda and brought short but very con­cise and infor­ma­tive story on Bire’s win­ery enti­tled as Bire win­ery and agro­tourism: Renais­sance of Grk.  Last time we brought Map of Grk with posi­tion of winer­ies, and now thanks to Taste of Croa­tia you can even get some of them tagged with GPS coor­di­nates. Thumbs up dear colleages!

5th of July 2011. was not just another sum­mer day in Dal­ma­tia but for many day of grief  and a day when Dal­ma­t­ian wine world lost one of it’s big con­trib­u­tors. Thus, when least expected our close friend Milan Ožić left us at his age of 29. This ener­getic young man, wine enthu­si­ast, world trav­eler, cool guy with open hori­zons and var­i­ous inter­ests, reli­able friend and excel­lent com­pan­ion, has in only few years suc­ceeded to leave a remark­able trace to now re-emerging Dal­ma­t­ian wine scene.  As one of the founders of Dal­ma­tia Wine Expo, Milan with his col­leagues has man­aged to place his birth town of Makarska as a cen­tral place for wine hap­pen­ings in south­ern Croa­tia. Unfor­tu­nately his dynamism and great aspi­ra­tion to con­tinue on the same path with new ideas and ven­tures were sud­denly stopped leav­ing in sor­row hun­dreds of peo­ple lov­ing his manière d’être, his thirst for dis­cov­er­ies and con­stant will to share good moments in life with peo­ple that sur­rounded him. Longer story on Milan is brought in Croa­t­ian ver­sion of this post while for the farewell we can only say: Mike we will miss you indefinitely!

Prob­a­bly one of the most excit­ing and funny wine gath­er­ings in Croa­tia this year was held on Agrokor Wine Acad­emy in Zagreb last Fri­day.  Spe­cial guest: Gary Vayn­er­chuk. This young Amer­i­can wine critic, busi­ness­man, enter­tainer and mas­ter for pair­ing wine & inter­net  became known to  Croa­t­ian broader pub­lic after his 553. episode of  Wine Library TV show and dis­cov­ery of Croa­t­ian wines where spe­cial trib­utes were given to famous Croa­t­ian red Plavac Mali.  Evening in Zagreb was ded­i­cated to a small group of wine lovers, blog­gers, jour­nal­ists and other peo­ple con­nected to this excit­ing field.  More exten­sive arti­cle on this event is writ­ten in Croa­t­ian by author of this site and brought to you this time on  JaTr­go­vac (Croa­t­ian Mag­a­zine for Con­sumer Goods).  If text in Croa­t­ian might for some read­ers be an obsta­cle, every­one shall cer­tainly enjoy the video.

Lit­tle renais­sance of viti­cul­ture and wine mak­ing in Lum­barda shows cur­rently it’s most remark­able traits on south­ern slopes of Lum­barda. When we told the story about first organic vine­yard on south-west parts of Lum­barda, raised by Franko Milina Bire on once aban­doned pieces of land that in the mean time became over­grown by mac­chia and other so called use­less veg­e­ta­tion, many would say very coura­geous and risky in terms of money and efforts for even­tu­ally uncer­tain results.   Every­one know­ing Franko is aware that all his ven­tures are well planed and based on solid argu­ments. In this case his the most sound rea­son was tra­di­tion of viti­cul­ture on in this part of Lum­barda and con­fig­u­ra­tion plus ori­en­ta­tion of the ter­rain ‚show­ing many sim­i­lar­i­ties to the best ter­roirs of the nearby Pel­je­sac penin­sula. Same premises were also very valu­able for another well known wine­maker and entre­pre­neur from Lum­barda, Bar­tul Batistic-Zure.  Zure whose wine mak­ing skills were already awarded on sev­eral occa­sions went this time in his vision and ambi­tion a con­sid­er­able step fur­ther.  With ten hectares of new plan­ta­tions, which is in terms of Lum­barda pretty impres­sive por­tion of land, Zure also decided to go with some vari­etals that none or almost none on Kor­cula seri­ously tried before. Of course indige­nous Grk with apx. 40 000 vines will be the most present one but this old-new ter­roir will be now shared with Korcula’s well known Posip and some of the great six mem­bers such as Mer­lot, Caber­net and Shyraz.  Big chal­lenge for Zure, but noth­ing is left to chance since whole project is sup­ported and advised by some of the best experts from Zagreb’s Fac­ulty of Agron­omy.  What the ter­roir itself will bring that’s in hands of mother nature, but accord­ing to some his­tor­i­cal facts and sim­i­lar expe­ri­ences, the expec­ta­tions, as well as the size of this project are every­thing but mod­est. Accord­ing to cur­rent devel­op­ments, time to redis­cover the taste of good old ter­roir will not take to long.

Sec­ond Dal­macija Wine Expo held in Makarska dur­ing the April 29. and 30.  showed new appear­ance of  new bot­tles and labels from two Lum­barda Grk pro­duc­ers.
Milina Bire win­ery already pre­sented it’s new Bur­gundy style bot­tle dur­ing last Zagreb Wine Gourmet, but this time bot­tle came in lit­tle bit darker ver­sion with new label clearly dis­play­ing this Grk Wine name over­lap­ping  lines of Greek alpha­bet that can also be found on famous Pse­fizm of Lum­barda, the old­est writ­ten doc­u­ment ever found in Croa­tia.
Cebalo Popić win­ery also brought some news. Since there are three Cebalo fam­i­lies among top seven Lum­barda wine­mak­ers it is some­times con­fus­ing for cus­tomers and wine lovers to be sure which bot­tle comes from which wine­maker. In this sense Zoran Cebalo decided to carry his busi­ness under new brand “Popić” which is also his sec­ond fam­ily name or more pre­cisely his nick name. These nick names which often look like reg­u­lar fam­ily names are fre­quently given in Lum­barda to bet­ter dis­tin­guish peo­ple from dif­fer­ent fam­i­lies hav­ing same  names.
More story and pic­tures on recent Dal­macija Wine Expo 2011. are given on lumbardanet.com, and down below we bring you pho­tos of the new bot­tles with their dis­tin­guished labels for bet­ter future recog­ni­tion.