Croatian Wine Tour

My last full day spent in Dubrovnik was another good one. I had a lot of fun on the Bosnian tour, and when Iva (I think that's how you spell his name) said there was a wine tour the next day for the same price (basically sixty dollars for all day transportation, four stops with wine, spirits and fresh food), I bit.

We started off at a famous botanical garden from the Baroque period. It is supposedly one of the oldest gardens in Europe. (It's definitely the oldest if you ask a Croatian). The garden was huge and had a wide variety of different plants and such (I managed to take a pretty cool picture of one), and it also had some old buildings and ruins with views of the ocean. How would you like to have this as your front yard?

He also pointed out that the palm trees are brown on the undersides. Iva said that this variety of palm is very hearty, but when the Serbs dropped bombs on Dubrovnik, the palms caught fire and almost burned down. He said that you can see evidence of the destruction everywhere if you just look closely at buildings and plants. When we asked him further about the war, he told us that the Serbs dropped bombs on his town on his first day of high school. He said he remembers his father organizing a town resistance, gathering machine guns and other things in case there was an invasion on foot. During the war he said that he lived as a refugee with his family in a hotel for a while. He told us that he occasionally has nightmares about it, but that life is very good right now for his family.

Looking at the family, you wouldn't know they had been through any kind of emotional trauma that a war can bring on - It was very interesting to spend time with people who lived through the biggest conflict of the decade in the nineties.

We left there after about an our and started off the actual wine tour at this water front little house where a woman lives with her husband and makes wine and catches oysters. When we got there she brought out 2 liters of wine from her cellar (one white, one red) and then went down to the water to get our oysters. Eating them straight from the sea like that was amazing, and even though there were a few little worms wiggling on the platter after we were down, Iva assured us that the worms were nothing to worry about: "Ah yes, ah yes, this means they are very fresh".

If there was one place I know my dad would have appreciated, it was this next stop (well maybe it would have been the oyster stop, you'll have to wait for his comment). We walked into a seemingly plain building, but were pretty struck when we walked into this cellar with cured ham hanging from all over the ceiling. We started off with a welcome spirit, and I ordered what she recommended - some kind of nut liquor.

Soon after she brought out a few liters of wine, fresh bread, olive oil, cheeses and of course, the prosciutto. It ages for two years in this cellar before they serve it. The meal was light, but really delicious, and I was disappointed to leave so soon. Iva assured us that there was much more to come, though.

The last stop on the wine portion of the tour, and perhaps the coolest, was an old man's giant cellar where he makes a ton of different spirits, as well as his own wine. He has made it illegally since the sixties, and has a million different stories about trying to brew alcohol illegally under communist rule, the war, etc. Before we got there, Iva told us that he prays every day that he is alive, because he drinks about two liters of wine a day. When we got there the wife told us that he was taking a little nap, and that would should help ourselves to his stash until he came down. Iva wasted no time pouring us his wine and spirits, and after a while, a very old man with a cap and cane walked slowly down into the cellar and started telling us stories about his winery, which is still ran illegally due to tax reasons.

I have videos of him talking, and he sounds just like the Godfather. I might get a chance to upload them later, but you'll just have to use your imagination by looking at his own bottle of wine (you can actually see him right behind it).

The beach and snorkeling was next. Iva spent a while trying to find "the perfect beach for today" and along the way we almost hit a turtle which Iva insisted we pick up and take back to his house for a pet. After giving the turtle to me to hold for a while, it started to pee and crap all in the bag we had under it, so we convinced Iva that dumping him off at the beach would be a much better idea.

When we all got to the beach we had a little trouble snorkeling after a day of drinking wine, but we all managed. The Norwegian guy was much more tolerable on this trip too. I don't know if it was because of an additional American besides myself on the trip, or the wine. Probably both. Either way, we got along pretty well the rest of the trip.

The last stop was the ocean-side pizza cafe. Iva ordered us pizza before hand, and we ended the day looking out over the water as the sun set. All in all, a great day for sixty bucks.