Serbia, with its autochthonous grape varieties and brave, innovative and curious winemakers, has successfully joined the trend of creating wine in amphorae, renewing and rediscovering a beautiful and thousand-year-old wine tradition.
Wine can teach us a lot about the place where it was created – the story of the cultural heritage of a people, the geographical characteristics of an area, and sometimes through wine we can also learn something about history. Amphorae are associated with the very beginnings of wine production, which goes back far into the past, and their popularity today in modern winemaking allows us to peek into “old times”. Ancient-style wines produced in amphorae are once again conquering the world, and they are also very popular in Serbia.
Produced mostly from white grapes, they are still closer to red wines in terms of structure. Their colour is strong, amber and orange, and their taste is full, solid, tart and dry. Their smell is striking, ripe and spicy, rustic and ancient.
The attractive method of storing and ageing wine in amphorae involves the use of clay vessels, often buried in the ground, in which the grape juice ferments together with the skin without too much effort by the winemaker. Archaeologists and historians say that the first wines in the world were produced in precisely this way. There are few opportunities to taste something that was produced in the same way 8,000 years ago, and it is even more unusual that, after all these millennia, these wines are once again entering avantgarde winemaking.
In Serbia, wines are produced in amphorae from the north to the south of the country, in all the important vineyards.
Only ten kilometres from Niš, the Malča Cellar stores wines in the same way as they were back when their city was called Naissus, in amphorae weighing a thousand kilograms. In Serbia, this old technique is also used by other wine houses, such as „Baša Vino“ winery from Fruška Gora. He is one of the winemakers who once went on what he called the “Georgian pilgrimage”, or a tour of traditional wineries where wine has been made in amphorae without interruption for millennia.
Fruška Gora is home to the Vinčić winery, which creates a unique aroma with “grašac” in an amphora, as well as the Kovačević winery, which makes amphora wines and contemporary wines with equal passion.