Croatia’s white wine and white seashores: a vineyard excursion of Korčula

Croatia’s white wine and white seashores: a vineyard excursion of Korčula 1
Travel n Tour

The Adriatic island of Korčula is home to a unique wine … perfect for sipping after a day journeying its scenic villages and beaches at 10.30 am; I thought it’d wear a piece early for a wine tasting. But the eight humans sitting inside the cool stone tasting room at Bire Winery have been already having a merry time of it. I had just cycled uphill from the seafront at Lumbarda, considered one of Korčula’s essential wine villages, and needed to stop myself from gulping down the proffered glass of chilled rosé. Fresh, light, and dry, it turned into the exceptional I’d tasted outside of Provence.

 

It was a remarkable prelude to the wine I had come to Croatia to taste: dry white grk, made from a grape grown nowhere else inside the globe. To add to its oddity, it’s woman simplest, so it needs any other grape to pollinate it. Step forward privacy mail, the total-bodied purple that’s found around Dalmatia and also is going into Bire’s moreish rosé.

 

Marko and Bartul Batistić of the Zure Winery Lumbarda Korcula Croatia
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Marko and Bartul Batistić of the Zure Winery. Photograph: Adam Batterbee
They’ve been making wine in Lumbarda for 2,000 years, and the wineries I was visiting were small worries which have been inside the own family for something from 2 hundred to six hundred years. From Bire, I cycled past olive groves to Zure Winery. Ivan and Marko Batistić have developed a sparkling grk, the first on the island, in conjunction with a formidable crimson (Rebellion) that blends privacy with four other sorts.

Image result for travelHe also does a grk model of the Croatian dessert wine prošek, a chunk like Hungarian Tokaj. All of those great wines went superbly with plates of octopus, local cheeses, and smoked ham made from the own family’s pigs – a tantalizing taste of what is obtainable in Zure’s vine-included eating place.

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One of the (non-sandy) beaches at Lumbarda.
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One of the (non-sandy) beaches at Lumbarda. Photograph: Maremagnum/Getty Images
Grk thrives in the sandy soil of Lumbarda. And it’s sand, in conjunction with wine, that attracts many to Lumbarda because it has that uncommon issue on Croatia’s stunning, however rocky coast: sandy seashores. Two of them. Three if you rely on the slim strip in the village contrary my motel, the enormously pleasant Hotel Borik. The motel’s flower-crammed terrace and its swimming pool had been serene spots from which to soak up perspectives of the harbor. It turned into also a quick distance of the seashores and vineyards, whether you were on two wheels or two toes.

Bilin Žal and Pržina seashores pinnacle and tail one of the island’s narrowest factors, with a sea of vineyards dividing the 2. Personally, I desired the pebbly Tatinja seashore, in which I ought to flow in clear waters while paddleboarders and kayakers surpassed me on their manner to the little islands of Vrnik and Gubavac.

Vineyards at Lumbarda.

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Vineyards at Lumbarda. Photograph: Adam Batterbee
“I in no way cross into the sea,” Stjepan Cebalo advised me. His Popić vineyard is one of the three biggest in Lumbarda, at the side of Bire and Zure (the village has seven). We sat on his blanketed terrace, observing at the ocean, his vineyards, terracotta-roofed homes, the white spire of Sveti Rok church, and the stark mountains and vineyards of the Pelješac peninsula beyond. The sea breeze changed into delicious on this 30C day. Like the Bire and Zure winery proprietors, Stjepan has sons who’re satisfied to hold at the circle of relatives commercial enterprise, bucking the trend of the agricultural desertification of different elements of Croatia. I changed into already thinking what in the world might make humans need to depart this area.

Swapping my bike for a scooter, I nipped over to Korčula Town, 6.5km away. Its fishbone-formed medieval vintage town changed into busy with day-trippers and those from small cruise ships and yachts. Many have been swept alongside the Marco Polo path that sprang up across the notion that the Venetian explorer was born in Korčula. I gave the Marco Polo Museum a omit and, as an alternative, wandered through alleys of light stone houses, stopping for an elegant lunch of seafood pasta on the waterfront terrace of the Lešič Dimitri Palace lodge.

Pupnatska Luka beach, Korcula island, Dalmatia, Croatia

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Pupnatska Luka seashore. Photograph: Simeone Huber/Getty Images
With motorized wheels, I headed into Korčula’s mountainous and thickly forested indoors. As I got closer to the wine-developing villages of Čara and Smokvica, the road swooped into valleys protected in vineyards of pošip (a greater floral white wine than grk) and private mail. Korčula’s heavily indented southern coast shelters splendid little pebbly beaches, including a secluded one at Žitna and a larger, deeper bay at Pupnatska Luka.

Back in Lumbarda, the village changed into gearing up for its Friday fish pageant, held weekly in summer. Fishermen and ladies installation grills within the rectangular contrary the little village beach, and we all queued up for freshly grilled snapper, sardines, and squid.

“It’s me, Agnieszka,” it starts of evolved. “The female who lives in my old condo in Gdansk despatched your letter on to me in Sweden.”

I get a bit buzz of pleasure from understanding that one of the few letters I posted made it to its meant recipient. She tells me of the “terrific adventures” she had thru the e-book before inviting me to go to her new domestic in Scandinavia. People to People lives on, it seems. I realize Jim may be delighted to hear it.

For greater on visiting Poland, see Poland.Travel. Read approximately Jim Haynes’s life and works on jim-haynes.Com. Vicky Baker is presently producing a documentary based totally on this text with Brave Spark Media.

Someone lit a bonfire at the seaside, and small youngsters, teenagers, and pretty some adults joined in a culture of leaping over the fireplace. It becomes an excellent, blissful spectacle. Drinking privacy mali and consuming seafood on the seashore, I blessed Korčula’s intoxicating blend of water and wine.