Plavac Mali

Plavac Mali is Croatia's most important red wine grape and the backbone of the country's celebrated Dalmatian reds, grown on the sun-baked slopes and stony islands of the Adriatic coast. A natural offspring of the ancient Tribidrag — the grape known worldwide as Zinfandel and Primitivo — it makes powerful, deeply coloured wines of dark and dried fruit, warm spice, garrigue herbs and high alcohol, framed by firm tannin. Its greatest expressions come from the near-vertical, sea-facing terraces of Dingač and Postup on the Pelješac peninsula, where old bush vines struggle on steep limestone to give dense, muscular, age-worthy wine. Robust, sun-drenched and unmistakably Mediterranean, it is the proud face of Croatian red wine.