For last eleven years, during the last weekend of November, luxury Esplanade hotel, Zagreb, becomes the venue of Croatian Wine and Food Festival, popularly abbreviated to VINOcom Zagreb. This is the biggest and most popular wine event in the Western Balkans, a place of pilgrimage for all wine lovers from this region, and this year we were lucky to be there.
Our first Zagreb VINOcom, and If we describe the organization quality, atmosphere and hospitality, score is excellent and fantastic. The manager of the festival Mr Ivan Dropuljic (or Professor for all domestic wine lovers), and his organization team have done a great job. From the first communication with the organizers to the send-off from the hotel after closing of the fair, everything was great.
Key Participation: The number of participants of the fair was just over 300, mostly from Croatia. Or 1700 wines from Croatia and more than 100 from the neighboring countries Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. Serbian colors were very well represented by three participants: Zvonko Bogdan winery, Erdevik winery and Tonkovic winery.
Luxury, posh Esplanade hotel built in the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in their six halls and big closed terrace received all participants and a huge number of visitors and everything was perfect. In the halls on the floor a lot of workshops with the introduction of quality wines from Croatian and abroad were held.
The Wines: If we talk about the exposed wines, score is even better than the ratings for the organization. Croatia has more than 40 recognized and registered Indigenous grape varieties, many of these are very exotic, they are endemic. So for the first time we tried a lot of wines about which we, previously, just read. Everything that we tasted was amazing, perhaps the tastes are recorded in our Mediterranean genes.