Boutique Croatian Wines

A Heritage Older Than Most Countries

Croatian winemaking traces back more than three thousand years, to the Illyrians who cultivated vines along the Adriatic around 1,000 BC. The Greeks brought new varieties. The Romans wove Croatian wine into the trade networks of the empire. For two millennia after, the country's vineyards survived everything history could throw at them — the Catholic Church protected production through the Middle Ages, the Habsburgs prized it, and even Napoleon's brief occupation left the cellars untouched.

And here's a story to pour with your first glass: DNA testing proved that Zinfandel is Croatian. America's beloved grape is genetically identical to Crljenak Kaštelanski (Tribidrag), an ancient variety from the Dalmatian coast. Even the legendary Miljenko "Mike" Grgich — whose Chardonnay beat France's best at the 1976 Judgment of Paris and put Napa on the map — learned his craft in Croatia first.

Then came the long dark stretch. Phylloxera wiped out more than 90% of Croatia's vineyards in the late 1800s. Two world wars and four decades of Yugoslav-era nationalization that prized volume over craftsmanship reduced the country to just five private winemakers by the time independence came in 1991. Croatia's wine industry, in effect, had to be rebuilt from the soil up.

And it was. Over the last thirty years, more than 800 producers have brought back what was nearly lost — across four wine regions and 130+ indigenous grape varieties that exist nowhere else on earth.

We curate two of the producers leading that revival: Brzica, family winemakers in Erdut on the Croatian Danube, where loess soil and 250+ days of sunshine produce barrel-aged reds released only after four years in the cellar; and Trapan, an organic estate in Šišan on the iron-rich red soils of southern Istria, whose flagship Malvazija has been rated 90+ since 2016. Available exclusively in Ohio.