A few years ago, I first encountered the Jungić winery at the Osijek wine, delicacies and pleasant living fair WINEOS. At that moment, I had no idea that Banja Luka had a wine scene, let alone that such wonderful wines were grown in its surroundings.
I have been preparing for the wine for a long time. road trip to Banja Luka and the wine-growing hills in its surroundings. I visited the Jungić winery, where everything started, then the intriguing Galla winery, which experiments with PIWI varieties and whose headquarters are in the basement of the Grand Hotel in Banja Luka, and finally the Dalmatin winery, which in the truest sense of the word can be called the modern founder of Banja Luka winemaking.
The trip to Banja Luka was also an opportunity, at least marginally (because time is, as always, limited, and there is so much to visit, see, taste...) to get acquainted with its craft distilleries, gastronomy, history and cultural heritage.
The visit to Banja Luka was organized by the always agile director of the Novo Gradiška fair and organizer NG Wine Fest Slavko SremacSlavko has built on his many years of experience in running a marketing agency and a general city fair by organizing a wine festival, as part of which he wine evaluation "Golden Vine"The Novograd public immediately accepted this, and the “Golden Vine” award initially attracted a large number of wineries from both Croatia and abroad.
The Nova Gradiška Wine Fair was and remains a good opportunity for wineries from the northern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina to present themselves to the Croatian audience. Nova Gradiška, although a small city in terms of population, has an excellent geographical position; it is located exactly halfway between the two largest cities in northern Croatia – Zagreb and Osijek. Banja Luka, the second largest city in the neighboring country, is half the distance from Nova Gradiška than Osijek or Zagreb.
Our wine expedition, apart from Slavko Sremac and my little one, also included winemakers Daniel Rabbit from the Zmajevo family cellar Zajec and Joseph Tomac, a winemaker from Novska who has his vineyards in both Slavonia and Moslavina. Zaječević is a Baranja winemaker known for his rosé that the audience simply adores, unusual blends such as Graminac, the only Baranja shiller currently available on the market, and unforgettable afterparties after every Zmajevac wine road.
The Tomac winery, on the other hand, cultivates Slavonian Graševina and Moslavina Škrlet with equal care, and at the most serious Croatian wine exhibition - the Zagreb Vinart Grand Tasting - it regularly attracts attention with a handful of different wine labels.
Jungić Winery is located some seventy kilometers south of the state border in the town of Markovac, municipality of Čelinac and is some twenty kilometers southeast of the entity center of Banja Luka. We decided to take a route that avoids Banja Luka, some kilometers shorter, some minutes longer in order to drive through the hills of the “border Tuscany”. Arable fields that are neatly cultivated, sheep that carefreely graze in the clearings and finally vineyards…
The Jungić winery is bustling and lively – cartons of wine are being packed for buyers from the Russian embassy. The property is beautifully integrated into the surrounding nature. Our hostess was one of the daughters of the winery's founder Zeljko Jungić. It all started out of passion and spite; Željko Jungić was a successful businessman who wanted to prove that top-quality wines could be grown in the Banja Luka area! And he succeeded! Last year they celebrated twenty years of the first plantings in Markovac, and the winery itself was registered in 2008.
- On the way here when you were coming to the winery 20 years ago, there was nothing, no roads, no houses. It was a completely forgotten area. This place where we are now, where the winery is, is known in this area as Junge, after our Jungić family. It is our grandfather's estate. The first idea was to build just a family cottage here, which now stands above the winery. My father planted the first grapevines, and he made wines for his family and friends in that cottage. My father had spent his entire life in telecommunications, as the director of a national operator and a professor at a university.
After his first hobby steps, he continued to explore this terroir, as well as further research into winemaking technology. He is now retired as a telecommunications expert, but finally fully dedicated to winemaking and viticulture. In 2008, we were the first and only winery officially registered in the northern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Until then, wineries existed only in the southern part of the country.
The vineyards are located at 280 m above sea level, and once between the two world wars, vines were grown here. Socialist planners decided that wine should only be grown in the southern part of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the vineyards in Bosanska Krajina disappeared. Until the appearance of Jungić, and a little before them Popović. They started with two wines – a white and a red blend. The red blend (cabernet sauvignon, merlot, frankovka) was named after the plot of land on which the vineyard was planted, and it was registered in the cadastre as Underbrush, and the white blend (chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, tamjanika) is called Ballatin along the stream that springs at the foot of the vineyard.
Today they have more than twenty wine labels and cultivate eight hectares of vineyards. One separate vineyard is planted only with tjanik. They have proven that excellent tjanik can be produced in this climate.
The Jungić Winery was a grand introduction to the Banja Luka wine story. We're going to the city for a well-deserved gastronomic break after the road and the first winery. It is debated where the kebabs are better. In the discussion, it became clear that tourists go to Muja, and insiders appreciate it Golden crown. Before the Crown and a short visit to Stara Ada. It is an island on Vrbas in the town itself, which has all the necessary tourist infrastructure and which once hosted the Banja Luka wine festival. Vinosaurus.
Zlatna kruna is a hotel with a grill on its ground floor. Everything we tasted there was top-notch; the meat and flatbreads melted in our mouths. Next to the hotel/grill is a small butcher shop where you can buy fresh everything you tried in the restaurant.
During lunch, we also get to know the engineering giants from Banja Luka. Behind them is a craft distillery Nibla from the village of Trn near Laktaš. As the name suggests, the distillery was founded by two mechanical engineers - Dejan Blagojević and Mile Ninić. There is also a play on words because enGINeer contains gin in its name. They are currently working on two labels - one is London dry gin, and the other distilled blue gin.
Last year, they won a silver medal for their first label at the World Gin Awards competition in London, where 900 samples from around fifty countries participated. Their London Dry Gin is a unique hommage Nikola Tesla because his sketches adorn his label. The base for their gin is wheat alcohol. They have also experimented with other types of grain alcohol and in the end wheat proved to be the most rewarding. They use exclusively spring water.
There are over 80 water springs in the area around Banja Luka. The area is also rich in pine trees, and everything they use to macerate their gin is harvested locally. There is a legend in Banja Luka that there is one man for every seven women, so their gin is macerated with seven herbs. Their blue gin has a natural blue color given to it by a flower, and when mixed with tonic, i.e. a drink with a low pH value, a reaction occurs and the gin turns pink. They are also announcing numerous new products, including aged gin and cherry gin.
It is less than two kilometers from the Zlatna Kruna Hotel to the Grand Hotel. Cellars are ideal, archetypal spaces for winemaking, and for the first time I visited a winery whose wine is aged in the hotel's basement. Winery Gala It is owned by the Galić family.
Their vineyards are located on the northern outskirts of Banja Luka, in the hilly area of Barlovaci. The vineyards are at 260 m above sea level, and they point out that the Dinaric and Pannonian climates mix there. 7.000 vines were planted with Rhine, Riesling, Merlot, Bronner and Muscaris varieties. It is these last two varieties that make them different from others. Namely, bronner and muscaris are the so-called PIWI varieties are hybrids resistant to fungal diseases. Therefore, they grow them organically, without the use of pesticides, herbicides and chemicals. Galla is also a distillery because they produce plum wine and barrique vines.
The last of the three wineries we visited, the sugar at the end was the winery Dalmatian which actually started the Banja Luka wine story even before Jungić.
- We are originally from Dalmatia, from the Šibenik area, and we have been involved in winemaking practically our entire lives. When we came here in 1995, my father simply ran out of wine and his first idea was to plant his own vineyard. At that time, there were no vineyards here and he didn't even know if grapevines could grow here. He saw that it was thriving! And it bore fruit well, production exceeded the family's needs and he gradually started selling it to others "from the garage". Over time, he became known as someone who offers homemade, quality wine. At that time, I was a professional journalist and wasn't that interested in vineyards, but I always jumped in when I needed to help and so I slowly absorbed the knowledge. When I decided to go full force into it, I told my father that we had to go more seriously and that's when we bought a few hectares of vineyards on the nearby hills.
We also found business partners for whom winemaking is not their core business, but who saw a good business opportunity in this wine story. We are in Vienna for our wines received two gold medals at the AWC judging, which was a big boost for us. We knew we had good wine, but until last year we had never competed at such a high level. We started expanding into restaurants, retail chains, and that expansion is still in full swing, emphasizes his son, Zoran Popović.
The Dalmatin winery now owns 6 hectares of vineyards where they grow Rhine Riesling, Chardonnay, Tamjanika and Morava – a variety bred at the institute in Sremski Karlovci and which the owners of the Dalmatin winery claim is great for blending with Rhine Riesling. And very grateful, because it is resistant to bortitis and can stay longer if you want more sugars. Of the red varieties, they have Cabernet Sauvignon and recently they experimentally planted Marselan. For example, they did not want to plant Vranac because it has a thin membrane and in September, when heavy rains flood this area, as Zoran says, it is not good for it at all.
On the way from Bosnia to Nova Gradiška, you should also stop by the hedonistic oasis in Bosanska Gradiška. Restaurant Đerdan it is located right next to the state border and is a real discovery. I found this out directly from the owner Gordana Šurlana who personally prepared a memorable dinner for us; showing that he is not only a good restaurant manager, but also a chef.
– It's all this aunt's fault!, concludes Gordan as he points to a picture on the wall of a lady whose name has been forgotten, and whose only known surname is Jungić. The walls are full of old pictures and other memorabilia, so it is difficult to distinguish what refers to what. An entire ambient microhistory seems to have been placed on the walls of this restaurant at the crossroads of worlds; Central Europe and the Balkans.
- Her father was from Slavonski Brod, a wood merchant, and they came to Gradiška through the shop. In this space she sold tobacco and wrote letters, and in the extension there was a family house. The owners were left without children, they died, the heirs were in Paris. They didn't know anyone here except us. They saw that we cooked well and gave us this space to open a restaurant.
The next picture is of Gordan's family. – This is our starting team, the father is unfortunately deceased, as is the old waiter, the brother used to be the chef. This is the team from 2012. In theirs hall of fame you can see that in 2008 they were declared the best restaurant in BiH.
17 years have passed since then, and you can't live off of old glory, so of course we had to try it. We left Gordan to design the menu, and then prepare it. After the introductory cicvar, the table was served with barbecue sausages from their production, then a souvenir - boneless drumstick baked with Gouda cheese and ham, topped with a sauce of milleram, garlic and parsley, then "ćevapi s juga", their signature dish - cylindrical ćevapi grilled on the grill finished in a sauce of roasting, milleram and roasted peppers, slightly spicy.
Also served was veal shoulder under a honeycomb, which is reduced with porcini mushrooms and red wine, served on mashed potatoes flavored with kulen. Also served was tarator salad – cucumbers, milleram, dill and walnuts, and the classic Shopska salad.
What can I say but that everything was expertly prepared, and the gastronomic delight that Gordan prepared for us was indescribable. True perfection of taste! Just as Gordan surprised us with the main courses, so it was with the dessert.
We were served San Sebastian cheesecake – a Basque dessert with toppings added in the Turkish version, and at Đerdan they make it with pistachios, then soufflé, as Gordan emphasizes the most copied dessert of all time, created by Michel Bras, then crumble with apples, cinnamon and caramel and finally baklava with hazelnuts. It is difficult to say whether the herbs were the first, salty half of the dinner, or the second, sweet. I recommend to all true gourmets to personally visit the Đerdan restaurant in Gradiška and make the decision for themselves.
