Plešivica Wine Road, Croatia

When we headed out of Samobor, we were on a road that one of our many guidebooks said was the beginning of the Plešivica Wine Road, so off we went. The Rough Guide did state that most winemakers are not set up to taste, but will offer you a taste. That we found to be true. The book also stated that the road was well marked. That was patently false. I should have become suspicious when the web site that the guide book recommended as part of the trip was entirely in Croatian and undecipherable (by me). We decided to head towards the town of Plešivica and hope for the best--which we knew might be a complete failure based on an attempt in Slovenia to follow a wine road (in that case we found ourselves on what was little more than a horsepath headed straight up a hill. Our rental car was definitely not up to the task and we did as our GPS so often encourages us to do--we 'turned around when possible'. The drive, up to the very end, was gorgeous, but no wine was encountered or drunk).

Up until the time we got to Plešivica we were convinced that no such wine road existed--we saw not one sign, and while there were plenty of grapes to be seen, wineries were scarce. In downtown Plešivica we hit the jackpot. A sign! Many wineries! We stopped at one place, with people out front, a large sign, and an open feeling. We judged their friendliness appropriately but not their preparedness. The sign was apparently the one thing that they had finished--the tasting room was piled high with furniture, but they quickly cleared a small area, put a table and chairs down for us, and started to pour. We didn't realize that it was a white wine region, and the red wine they poured, Portugiser (a Croatian version of Nouveau Beaujolais) was not to our liking, but the various brandies and a nut liquor that we very much enjoyed. Amongst the three men serving us, only one spoke any English, which he learned from listening to rock and roll--in particular, he was a big Led Zepelin fan and he and my husband bonded briefly over 'Stairway to Heaven'. They were the only people all trip that inquired about our Serbian car--politely, but they were quite curious how we had come by it. We bought several bottles and moved on, but brandy in the morning took it's toll. We stopped at one additional place and tasted the region's best known white wine grape, Graševina, which was delicious--a flavorful and interesting light white wine that we bought a bottle of and then drove on. Another trip we would perhaps have stayed nearby and tried several more wines in the small but charming town of Plešivica.