September in Pelješac vineyards
Wine lovers, this is it!
The most exciting time of the year in wine country.
The reasons are threefold: the weather is a little cooler, the grapes are ripe and everywhere is bustling with activity. This is the season that all the growers, winemakers, and winery owners live for.
If you are vacationing in Dubrovnik in September, you should take the opportunity to feel it, see, it, smell it! A two-hour drive to Pelješac is definitively worth your while.
Region’s all-star is definitively ”Plavac Mali or “Little Blue(grape)” and the Dingač area,
where the best varieties are grown. It is a small patch of picturesque vineyards located on southern hillsides, unique for the microclimate, which can have up to 3000 hours of intense sunlight annually.
In the spirit of the mantra of Galileo Galilei, who said: “Wine is sunlight held together by water” Plavac Mali is all about the sun. The very key to its taste lies in the fact that the steep limestone slopes which spread above the Adriatic shoreline give the grape “three Suns” – from high up, reflecting from the limestone and reflecting from the sea, giving the grape almost 60 degrees Celsius to mature in.
Like all great things, the terrain is both a curse and blessing. To add to an already arduous job, vineyard owners in certain areas have parts of their vineyards so steep that the only way to maintain them is by hanging on a suspension rope.
The production is still very small, very traditional and the vineyards are family-owned but don’t be mistaken– the images of the harvests from a bygone era, where donkeys were transporting the wine crates and women pressed the grapes with their feet as they sang are now a distant memory. But the countryside is still swarming with people and tractors carrying crate loads of handpicked grapes to the wineries, where they are immediately pressed, as the air becomes filled with the characteristic fragrance of the “must.”
If we managed to convince you visit Pelješac, make sure you stop by Skaramuča family vineyards where ALH Dingač Reserve is grown!
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