Wine is increasingly becoming the drink of choice in Belgrade’s trendier bars and cafés.

Bordeaux and Belgrade are both situated on the 45th parallel. Why does that matter? Ask the thousands of wine lovers in the city, whose passion for locally produced wines is driving the domestic industry forward. As more and more chic hot spots open around town and the city continues to gain international acclaim for its night-life, internationals too are becoming more and more aware of what Serbia’s wineries have to offer.

Well-travelled Belgraders and foreigners alike have become accustomed to more sophisticated tastes, and a glass of wine has become the natural choice, a new expression of status in Belgrade.

Just ask the locals, as Friday arrives, friends across town are spurning the rakija and uncorking a bottle of wine as a way to warm up and kick off weekend festivities.

Where else better to go to find out about this trend than the city’s first bar exclusively dedicated to the divine liquid: the Wine bar, located on Dositejeva. Manager, Dejan Milakovic invited us in for a tasting.

Dejan, a tall dark, and robust man, serious about his trade, took our coats and settled us in at the bar as if setting up new converts at an altar.

He asked us what we knew about wine in general, and never ready to confess my ignorance I rattled off random names and phrases that sounded technical and fancy, but he saw through the posing; he shook his head, as if to say this lesson was going to be a long one. Dejan has been managing the bar for a year and a half but has spent more than a decade on the local wine scene, selling, buying, critiquing, but mostly getting to know the local products.

He explained that anyone curious about wines from the region, needed a just a few basic points for comparison, perhaps the ability to tell a chardonnay from a sauvignon or a cabernet from a pinot noir, but he says, often it’s the native grapes which make the flavours of Balkan wines so enticing.

With nearly 70,000 hectares of vineyards, an ideal geographic location and weather ideal for grape harvesting, production is on the up in Serbia and the country produces around 500,000 tons of grapes annually, the majority of which end up in local wines. Previous lack of investment and closed markets, has meant that Serbian wine is a rarity on international tables, but in the last five years there has been a renaissance in winemaking, with great effort placed on creating wines which are sophisticated, modern and appealing to international wine buyers.

Dejan told us that a good place to start for the initiate might be wines made by more well known Serbian producers such as Zupa, Rubin, Vrsacki and Vinogradi, noting that for the beginner a bottle of Terra Lazarica by Rubin is one of the few world class wines produced in Serbia that can be found on wine lists all over the city.

A proper scholar, Dejan insisted he give us a little history lesson before a drop would be poured. With a proud and long history surpassing a millennium, Serbian rulers have long adored the local wine growing culture and went to lengths to preserve it, especially during the period of the Nemanjic dynasty from the eleventh till the end of fourteenth century where many monasteries were known for their wines.

Serbia’s wine-land is an interesting place to explore, and Belgrade is right smack in the middle of the ‘Smederevo Wine Route’. It cuts through the most important Serbian wine producing regions such as Negotinska krajina (250 kilometres to the east of Belgrade), Vrsac (100 kilometres to the north-east), on the slopes of Fruška Gora (80 kilometres to the north-west), Subotica (200 kilometres to the north), Sumadija (100 kilometres to the south-west) and Župa (230 kilometres to the south-east). These areas combine to produce over two million litres annually.

By now we were parched but fortunately at that moment Dejan introduced us to the head bartender, Lazar Georgevic. Starting with the reds, he poured a Radovanovic Cabernet, with a bold nose, a bouquet of cherries and a long dry finish. On through a light bodied Dingac, with notes of strawberry and wood, to Lazar’s favourite, Aurelius Barrique, a rich deep blackcurrant coloured wine with a plummy aroma, fully bodied with well developed tannins. Then Princ, made from the Rskavac grape with a vanilla nose huge tannins, and a strong and lingering woody finish. Next up was Opium, snother fine example and then I’m afraid things became rather a blur. We never got around to trying the rosés or the whites, but as Dejan said, there’s always tomorrow.

What makes Balkan wines distinct?

The taste of Serbia is in her grapes:

Smederevka: a native white wine grape variety grown in Smederevo, just outside of Belgrade, and in the Tikves wine-growing region of Macedonia. It produces a dry and crisp wine prone to fruitiness.

Prokupac: a red, specifically Serbian wine grape that is often used to produce darkly coloured rosés, this grape has high sugar levels which vinters manipulate for the high levels of alcohol it can produce.

Krstac: an ancient variety of white grape indigenous to Serbia and Montenegro is usually reserved for high quality dry white wines, rich and aromatic it also can produce high alcohol levels.

Vranac: is a common and ancient variety of red grape that is typically Balkan, grown mainly in Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro. It produces a particularly dry red wine with a unique taste of dark berries.

Other less common grape varieties that wine adventurers might like to seek out include Rskavac, Treminac, Tamjanka, and Dinka, and occasionally Tamjanika and Krokan, originally a French muscat grape, grown in Serbia for over 500 years.

Wine Tasting for Beginners

See, Sniff, Sip, Summarise

1. Life your glass by the stem to avoid warming the wine in the bowl of your glass.

2. Raise your glass to check the wine’s colour and hue - it should be clear, not cloudy - best against a white background.

3. Swirl the liquid by gently rotating your wrist; as the wine leaves trails, or tears, it reveals alcohol content and it transports aromas through the air.

4. Sniff deeply and try to identify the wine’s traits, which could range from an essence of raspberry to chocolate, fruit or even tobacco.

5. Sip the wine - but don’t swallow, yet. Hold the wine and swish it across your tongue and inner cheeks before exhaling slowly through both nose and mouth to amplify the taste.

6. Summarise and make your own decision, everyone’s taste buds are different.

Trencherman's Picks

Yugoslav wines of old, when they were available internationally, were usually poor quality party wines, made with little finesse and made to a price point.

These days, there’s still a lot of unpalatable local wine around but there are one or two quality producers, making wine that will stand up to the toughest scrutiny. Don’t expect good local wines to be cheap – quality and bargain are only occasional bedfellows - but there are some products out there that more than stand up to the European and New World competition.

Do Kraja Sveta make reliable easy drinking wines, as do Aleksandrovic, whose Varijanta Oplenac is a classy party rose, but these are my two current favourites:

Milan Jelic, Pinot Noir

This wine fills the mouth with powerful but well balanced fruit, and big spicy, cinnamon notes. It’s subtle and every drop reminds you that you’re drinking a classy product. Milan Jelic wines are the premium products of the Tamuz winery and the Chardonnay also rates highly.

WOW Chardonnay

The WOW (World of Wine) winery is pretty new on the scene but has quickly built up a reputation for making some very classy products. The Pinot is excellent but my favourite is the buttery smokey chardonnay. Definitely a wine to savour.

This article is courtesy of Balkan Insight, the online publication of the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network, which contains analytical reports, in-depth analyses and investigations and news items from throughout the region covering major challenges of the political, social and economic transition in the Balkans.

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