Wine Horizons 2023

WINE HORIZONS

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EMBRACING TRANQUILITY, WINE TOURISM, AND AUTUMNAL CHARMS

Late summer, often overlooked in favour of the peak holiday months, presents an ideal chance for travellers to embrace a quieter, more contemplative atmosphere

As the sun gradually dips below below the horizon and the summer heat mellows to a gentle warmth, a hidden gem of travel opportunities emerges in Serbia and its neighbouring countries. Late summer, transitioning into early autumn, offers an enticing escape for those seeking a unique holiday experience. This season holds a dis-

tinct charm, with its advantages ranging from a tranquil environment to nurturing the soul through relaxation and an enticing array of autumnal tourist attractions, including the captivating world of wine tourism. The tourist hotspots that might have been bustling during the peak summer season now offer a sense of tranquillity, allowing visitors to truly immerse themselves in the beauty of

their surroundings. The gentle rustle of leaves and the subtle shift in colours create a picturesque backdrop that is both serene and captivating. For the modern professional, the significance of taking a break cannot be overstated. The late summer period provides a perfect opportunity for respite from the demands of work. The quiet charm of the season invites individuals to disconnect from

their routines and reconnect with themselves. Escaping the fast pace of daily life and indulging in some well-deserved relaxation can significantly improve mental and physical well-being. As the saying goes, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Late summer offers a chance to rejuvenate, fostering a better worklife balance and ultimately leading to enhanced productivity and creativity.

The tapestry of autumnal tourist attractions in Serbia and its neighbouring countries is nothing short of mesmerising. Mountains adorned with the rich hues of autumn foliage entice nature enthusiasts with invigorating hikes and captivating vistas. Ancient vineyards, now bathed in the warm autumn light, beckon wine enthusiasts and curious travellers alike. Among the various attractions, wine

tourism stands out as an increasingly popular pursuit. This is a season when vineyards come alive, offering guided tours that reveal the intricate process of wine production. The chance to witness and participate in the grape harvest creates an immersive experience that speaks to the heart of the region’s cultural heritage.

Wine tourism, in particular, has become a defining feature of the late summer and early autumn experience. The vineyards that stretch across the landscape offer not only the opportunity to savour exquisite wines, but also to understand the connection between the land, the grape, and the bottle. Tasting events, guided tours and workshops provide travellers with insights into the craftsmanship behind each bottle. The warm colours of the vineyards in autumn, coupled with the

rich aromas of ripening grapes, create an ambience that is nothing short of enchanting.

In conclusion, the late summer period in Serbia and neighbouring countries is a treasure trove of unique experiences. It’s a time when the pace slows down, the colours deepen, and the soul finds solace. For professionals seeking a meaningful break, it’s an opportunity to recharge and rekindle their creativity. The autumnal tourist attractions, with a special focus on wine tourism, weave a story of beauty, cultural heritage, and sensory indulgence. Late summer, with its gentle allure, invites travellers to embark on a journey of relaxation, exploration and connection with the heart of the region.

THE AUTUMNAL TOURIST ATTRACTIONS, WITH A SPECIAL FOCUS ON WINE TOURISM, WEAVE A STORY OF BEAUTY, CULTURAL HERITAGE, AND SENSORY INDULGENCE

Over the last ten or so years, Serbia – as a wine and viticulture destination – has represented something new on the wine scenes of Europe and the world

FROM YELLOWING RECIPES TO TOP RESTAURANTS

Having launched operations with just two hectares of vineyards and a cellar covering 60m2, Vinarija Aleksandrović today has approximately 85 hectares of vineyards and has produced around 300,000 bottles of wine, exclusively using grapes from its own production

but we believe that you also look far into the future. Are we mistaken?

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ožidar Aleksandrović, as a representative of his family’s fourth generation of grape growers and winemakers, proudly shares his wine story and the secret recipe of Triumf wine, revealing why all the work in his vineyards is done by hand and why wine tourism repre-

sents a development opportunity for Serbia.

The Aleksandrovićs have spent almost 120 years engaged in viticulture and winemaking. You are surely very proud of the tradition that serves as the foundation for everything you do,

I am the fourth generation of grape and wine producers in my family and my entire wine story is based on the foundations of family winemaking. At the very beginning, I had two hectares of vineyards and a 60m2 cellar under the house, where we produced wine for our own needs, only later adding our own labels and appearing on the market. The emergence of a private winery in the ‘90s resounded around the region, with everyone wanting to try the top-quality wine from the cellar of the Aleksandrović family. We then produced five to six thousand bottles of wine annually and sold them at a few of the best restaurants in Belgrade and the surrounding area, while our new stage and the creation of a new vision began in the year 2000, and as you see continues to this day.

During that initial period, I first planted three hectares, then another five, then seven, and so on over subsequent years, while I also start-

BOŽIDAR ALEKSANDROVIĆ, OWNER, VINARIJA ALEKSANDROVIĆ WINERY

ed construction of the winery, which now – after several construction stages – covers about 3,000m2. From the outset, we had the vision that we would produce high-quality wines; that everything should be in the service of quality. It was in that way that we designed the vineyard, and that’s also how we approach the production of grapes and wine.

A significant moment occurred in 1992, when famous palace cellarman Živadin Tadić, who had emigrated to Canada after World War II, discovered that the Aleksandrović family was restoring the winemaking tradition of the Oplenac region and sent the original recipe – for the Triumf varietal composition. That had been the best wine of the royal cellars, which was consumed at almost all European courts prior to World War II. And so it was that in our cellar, on the basis of a yellowing manuscript, we began inscribing new pages in the family’s long history of viticulture and winemaking, relying on the experiences of our ancestors, new scientific findings and modern technology. Today, after three decades, our wines can be found in La Cité du Vin – the World Wine Museum in Bordeaux, as well as on the wine lists of the most prestigious hotels and restaurants around the world – from Japan, China and Russia, via Western Europe, all the way to the U.S.

You keep pace with world trends and styles, while you also possess knowhow, stateof-the-art equipment, technology, expert people... And yet, despite all this, you still pick your grapes by hand?

The quality of wine arises in the vineyard. Each hectare of vineyard requires almost 400 hours of manual labour, from pruning to the harvest itself, in order to produce high-quality grapes that will later produce top-quality wine. As such, wine production at Vinarija Aleksandrović is a manual process, the wine emerges in the vineyard, with the great use of

the human labour that is essential to produce wine of a superior quality.

Wine critics and wine lovers around the world are increasingly praising Serbian wines, and yours are among the most popular and awarded. How would you explain this?

Over the last ten or so years, Serbia – as a wine and viticulture destination – has represented something new on the wine scenes of Europe and the world. Due to the wines of this area being seen as exotic, wine journalists, critics and wine lovers are increasingly paying attention to us. Interestingly, Aleksandrović wines have been on the wine lists of restaurants and hotels almost worldwide for many years, including at least 30-40 Michelin-starred restaurants. We were carried to the most prestigious places by the high-quality, continuity of quality and exotic nature of our wines.

Aleksandrović wines very quickly began occupying a significant spot and winning medals at the most prestigious world competitions, with one of the most beloved being Sequra in Tokyo, where our Rodoslov wine won a major gold medal. In London, our Triumf sparkling wine was declared the best non-Champagne wine produced using the Chateaux method, while Triumf is also a multiple winner of many fairs. It was declared the best Balkan wine at the 2019 BIWC competition in Bulgaria, while there are also a large number of gold medals from competitions like Decanter (England), Mundus Vini (Germany), AWC Vienna (Austria) etc.

Will wine tourism achieve parity with mountain, spa and rural tourism? Can this help revive our villages?

Wine tourism worldwide represents, in and of itself, great potential for the development of a region or country. Why shouldn’t that be the same in our country? We are essentially witnessing the fact that an ever-increasing number of wine tour-

ists are visiting Serbia and that wine tourism is the future of our country’s development.

Vinarija Aleksandrović has been engaged in wine tourism for 10 years already, and we are visited by between 12,000 and 15,000 people annually. We recognised the importance of wine tourism to our further development and began investing in that sector. We built two houses with swimming pools, which are surrounded by vineyards and provide wonderful views of Oplenac, and we’ve also started constructing a hotel, Wine Resort, which will ena-

Aleksandrović wines have been on the wine lists of restaurants and hotels almost worldwide for many years, including at least 30-40 Michelin-starred restaurants

ble wine lovers to have a comfortable stay and an enjoyable time overall.

What can Serbian wine tourism offer guests?

Wine tourism is much more than simply touring wineries. Tourists can acquaint themselves with the culture and tradition of the areas they’re visiting, with the production process itself, and they can consume wines alongside various gastronomic specialities. Our doors are open to wine lovers from all over the world, and in addition to tours of the winery and cellar, we offer them curator consultations, tastings, food and wine pairings, the organisation of seminars and expert lectures. Our guests can stay overnight and enjoy breakfast in the winery itself, or in one of our houses with a swimming pool, which are located in the vineyards.

Vinarija

Aleksandrović has been engaged in wine tourism for 10 years already, and we are visited by between 12,000 and 15,000 people annually

FINDING THE RIGHT WINE FOR EVERYONE

Wine Cellar Panajotović produces wines from superior grape varieties sourced from Serbia’s most renowned vineyards – from Smederevo, Erdevik and Velika Drenova, to Banoštor on Fruška Gora – and produces them according to a traditional ancestral recipe that’s perfected with modern technologies and scientific discoveries

as one of the smaller producers in Kruševac, only for his operation to subsequently grow into serious production of approximately 200,000 litres of wine and 50,000 litres of rakija. His cellar was taken from him after World War II, and that cellar operated as the Trstenica Cooperative until 1985. My grandfather continued producing small quantities of wine, around 2,000-3,000 litres purely for personal consumption, only for my father to relaunch wine production here in Belgrade back in 1994, with the first wine bottled as early as 1995. It was quite logical for me to continue pursuing my grandfather’s vision and my family tradition.

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Wine tourism is on the rise and almost all wineries across the country organise wine tours, but our interlocutor, Mr Vladimir Panajotović, is the only winemaker who receives visitors in ancient cavern chambers located 10 metres underground, organises tastings of top wines and food at a constant temperature of 12°C.

Over the course of almost an entire century, four genera-

tions of the Panajotović family have sought to provide their wine with enough love and expertise to make it the best it could possibly be. What represented the starting point? Was it Grandfather Toma’s vision that you are still pursuing? That somehow came naturally, because our family’s winemaking tradition dates back to 1927, when my great-grandfather, Toma, produced the first quantities of wine,

What is the secret to your success? Which wine is the most precious to you?

The secret is in persistence and in effort. Even when it seems as though we’ve hit a wall that has nothing beyond it, there is always light at the end of the tunnel. Over the past few years, the wine hasn’t been served by the best weather, but we somehow always manage to overcome the problems and turn out the best wines. My favourite wine is Victor Barrique.

VLADIMIR PANAJOTOVIĆ, WINE CELLAR PANAJOTOVIĆ

What’s included in everything you offer the visitors who leave your winery feeling enchanted and delighted?

We leased our chamber, where we store our wines and hold tasting sessions, from Public Enterprise Skloništa Srbije [Serbian Shelters] more than 18 years ago, because it maintains a constant temperature of 12 degrees, which is excellent for storing wine. We’ve actually always been fascinated by the entire history of Belgrade’s subterranean world, especially the symbolism, because the caverns were created by the Romans in the 1st century AD, when they first started settling this region. It was also then that they brought vines, because wine was very important, in various aspects, for all civilisations of the ancient world. The caverns that we use were also used by the Nazis in World War II, because the station of the secret police was in the same street.

Our range of wines is designed to cater to all tastes, or rather we ensure that everyone can find something that suits their taste perfectly. At our tastings, the wines are tried in a specific order, and that’s done for two reasons. Firstly, each subsequent wine is stronger than the previous one, and the tasting can also represent lunch, so we have an appetiser, a main course and a dessert. We do tastings in Serbian and English, with professional guides in a cavern that’s 10 metres underground. Local guests are extremely interested in the winemaking process, have plenty of questions about it and seek advice, while foreign tourists like to hear about the history and culture of the wine, about myths and legends. I like to think that we’ve covered all aspects.

Apart from winemaking and wine tourism, one branch of your company also handles consulting services. Which as-

pects of your operations does this segment encompass?

Alongside wine production and wine tourism, a branch of our company also deals with the providing of consulting services in the field of wine and rakija production, conducting complete laboratory analyses of wine, as well as designing and equipping wineries. There are multiple different aspects of providing consulting services in the field of wine production. We have consultations in managing wine production from the initial stages –determining the right moment to harvest grapes, consultations during the grape harvest itself, during

processing, fermentation, finalisation and, ultimately, clarification and bottling of the wine. We also provide standalone consultations at any stage during the wine production process, consultations on midcourse corrections aimed at improving a wine’s organoleptic properties, consultations on the production of fruit distillates in accordance with the fruit-to-bottle system. And in addition to all of this, we can also provide a wine production service – clients send us grapes, and we send them top-quality wine in the bottle. This service implies the complete production of wine from the grapes that are submitted to us, and it has proven to be a wonderful opportunity for all vineyard owners who don’t have their own cellars, but want to try their hand at winemaking, as well as for great wine lovers who procure grapes from verified vineyards because they want to make top quality wines but lack the required material conditions.

Why do you insist on limited small batches?

To us, it is much more important that we produce high-quality wines than that we respect the year and capacity. If a year happens to be very bad for grape cultivation, and thus for wine production, we have to choose what we will produce in such a way that our quality doesn’t fall. As a wine lover, my collection includes wines aged over 10 years.

The best promoters of your wines are tourists who’ve had an opportunity to enter the chambers on Senjak?

That’s right! Alongside our own inhouse marketing team, the best marketing is always word of mouth. That is literally true in our case, because the wines are recommended precisely by those who’ve tried them. Thanks to the Wine Lovers Club of Panajotović Cellar and our online shop, our wines reach all parts of the world.

OUR RANGE OF WINES IS DESIGNED TO CATER TO ALL TASTES, OR RATHER WE ENSURE THAT EVERYONE CAN FIND SOMETHING THAT SUITS THEIR TASTE PERFECTLY

“Wine is passport to the World”

Thom Elkjer