Croatia Day 2 – The Wine Starts
Friday, 16-Jun-2017
Tags: Travel
We got up Friday morning and went out to walk around the town a little and hit a grocery store for a few small items.
Around 10 AM we all met at Mirena and Win's for a large brunch on her back porch. Braco cooked omelets and we had a variety of fruit and vegetables primarily from his garden and fruit trees. We sat and talked and ate until about 12:30.
We split up and several of us changed and went down to the beach for a little while. The water here is incredibly clear and pretty warm. (Interestingly, although Gradac feels and looks slightly tropical – it was between 80° and 100°F every day – it is actually at 43°N which is farther north than Boston).
Around 2:30 we left for a 30-minute drive southeast to a winery for a tour, some wine tasting, and some charcuterie. We went to the Terra Madre winery in the town of Komarna. People in Croatia have been growing grapes and making wine for a long time, but there have not, for the most part, been large commercial wineries like you see in Sonoma or Napa. The group that purchased Terra Madre pumped a lot of money into it. They built a new winery at the top of a hill overlooking the Adriatic. They planted acres of grape vines down to the sea focused on two types, Plavac Mali (literally "little blue berry") which is a traditional Croatian variety similar to Zinfandel, and Pošip, a lighter grape used for white wine.
(When we went to Dubrovnik a few days later, we took the following picture of the winery from the road.)
After the wine tasting and a little food we drove back to Gradac, stopping a couple of times along the way to admire the scenery.
We got back about 6 PM and relaxed a while and took a walk along the sea for about half mile and and caught a spectacular sunset on the way back.
We stopped at Win and Mirena's briefly and not finding them there, we went to Malo More again, found some of the group who had already had some drinks and food. We sat next to them and had some beer and a seafood pizza at the restaurant and then went back to the room for bed.
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Larry and Eileen Samberg