Belgrade, strong wind, but my hair is still holding. Or was that not the popular advertisement? Anyway. After tasting nineteen hundred wines, you don't necessarily crave wine, I was happy to go with the organisers to the Crvena Zvezda - Partizan Beograd basketball Euroleague match, especially as there is probably no other atmosphere like the one in Belgrade at a match anywhere in the world. Then, after three hours of shouting and cheering, when we got back to the hotel, there was Dashamir Elezi, a fellow Albanian, sitting there offering us wine. I accepted. I couldn't have done better!
But what was I doing in Belgrade? Well, I was at the Open Balkan exhibition. One of the most important elements of Open Balkan for me is Wine Vision, which has grown in three years to become Europe's third largest wine fair and is now rivaling ProWein.
Dashamir Elezi
Wine Vision is a multi-day international-Balkan wine competition, where the wines of the Open Balkan members, i.e. Albania, North-Macedonia and Serbia, are judged by an international jury, following the Decanter World Wine Award model, i.e. the wines are pre-poured into glasses, usually 10-13 of them, and the final order is determined by comparing and tasting them back to back, while the 100-point system is also interpreted in the Anglo-Saxon model, steering the judges towards the many medals. That said, this is the best opportunity to taste the Balkans' wines, either as a judge or at the three-day giga wine show that follows the competition, where the whole world is there, except of course the Hungarians, who don't seem to have the organisational time and money to be present in Europe's only growing market, the Balkans.
Well, after I have explained at length why I was in Belgrade, let's go back to the Albanian wine and our friend Dashamir in the subtitle. As God is my witness, I didn't want to drink wine! I tasted ninety or so at the tournament in the morning, then wandered around the city, finally went to the best basketball game of my life, smoked in the arena (in Serbia it's still easy to smoke everywhere, and the guy in front of me smoked two packs of cigarettes during the game), then at midnight I went to the hotel and Dashamir came up to me to taste his wine. Oh my! Of course there was no escape route, bottle in one hand, glass in the other, what could I do, I nodded for him to pour. Half of it is Mavrud (a wonderful Bulgarian grape variety, you can find information about it here), the rest is Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon, there is a lot of alcohol in it (15%), and the bottle weighs about 4 kilos, I'm not kidding, I've never seen a bottle like this in my life, you can really beat a bear to death with this.
But the wine is super. The colour is dark and deep ruby with a black core. The nose is purple floral, chocolatey, licorice at first glance, then as it opens, some red berry forest fruit emerges. Tasting it, big body but brisk acidity, the alcohol is nicely infused but doesn't hang out, everything is big, everything is deep and complex. The finish is long, a bit jammy. Definite five stars, though more like the bottom five. On a scale of one hundred (OIV), somewhere between 88 and 91/100 points. I wouldn't drink it anytime, but I don't think it's made for that purpose, more of a celebration when opened.
The winery is located somewhere near Lake Ohrid, south of it, according to their Albanian-only website (google translate my friend) they farm ten hectares, and Dashamir has made his own wine with them as a sort of consultant, with only 2,000 bottles. I'm curious to see the rest of their wines after this! But the best part is that I enjoyed the sip quite unexpectedly, so I didn't run for a spittoon, but drank it. What greater praise could a wine ask for?
