A Short History of Serbian Wine

I’ll start with a dead emperor, because every Serbian winemaker does. Probus was born in Sirmium, a Roman town that is now Sremska Mitrovica, about an hour west of Belgrade on a bad day for traffic. Somewhere around 280 AD, he scrapped the old imperial rule against planting vines outside Italy, and then, having a lot of soldiers standing around with nothing to conquer, he handed them shovels and pointed at the hills of Fruška Gora. Dig. Plant. The soldiers hated it, and in 282 they killed him for it, or so says the Historia Augusta, a text that lies roughly as often as it breathes. I don’t care. The vineyards are still there, and a nation that explains its wine with an assassination has already won me over.

Fast forward to the 1880s. Phylloxera is murdering French vineyards, French négociants are frantic, and a few of them turn up in Negotin, a town on Serbia’s far eastern border, filling barrels with whatever the locals would sell. Good years. Short years. The louse arrived in Negotin itself in 1886, and that was that. But go to the villages of Rajac or Rogljevo today, and you’ll find the hillside above the houses covered in stone cellars, hundreds of them, built in that boom and never torn down. No one lives up there. You go up there to drink, and for nothing else. The locals call the cellars pimnice, from pimnuti, “to take a sip.” Serbian is not a subtle language, and I love it for that. Oh, and in 1907, long after the French had forgotten the place existed, Rajac wines won bronze medals at a show in London. File that under “told you so.”

Serbian Grape Varieties: Prokupac, Tamjanika, Kadarka

Three grapes you need, and I’ll keep it to three because this is a beer site and I know my audience. Prokupac is the red of the south and centre. Its home turf is the Župa valley around Aleksandrovac, which also happens to be the one region that bothered replanting it after phylloxera, which is why Župa still has vines pushing a hundred years old. Under Yugoslavia, the cooperatives paid by weight, full stop, so for fifty-odd years prokupac was farmed like a dairy herd and shipped out as rosé by the tanker. Today, it offers a very different side of Serbian winemaking, making it worth considering alongside refreshing summer wines when looking beyond the usual beer choices. 

Treat it properly: low yields, a year in a barrel, and you get something else: a mid-weight red, sour cherry, cracked pepper, with enough acid to stay standing through August in Serbia, which is saying something. Since 2016, it even has a national day. October 14th. I am not making this up. Tamjanika is Muscat à petits grains wearing a Serbian passport, and the passport tells you what’s inside. Tamjan is the Serbian word for incense. If you’ve ever stood through an Orthodox service, you already know this nose. Most producers here make it dry, which pulls Muscat out of the sticky-dessert corner where the rest of Europe parked it ages ago. 

And then there’s crna tamjanika, the dark-skinned version, a grape that flowers so badly nobody sane would bother with it; around Negotin it had more or less become a rumour until the monks at Bukovo Monastery planted two hectares about ten years back. Monks. It’s always monks. Kadarka. Pannonian, Hungarian as much as Serbian, grown in Vojvodina and in a few patches of sand north of Subotica where phylloxera can’t survive, and some vines still sit on their own roots the way all vines did before the 1870s. Pale red, light, peppery. These unusual varieties tell a bigger story about growing in Serbia, where local growers have worked to preserve grapes that might otherwise have disappeared. Twentieth-century Serbia took one look, decided nobody would pay for a red wine you could read a newspaper through, and planted Cabernet instead. Remember that decision. We’ll be coming back to it.

What Modern Serbian Winemaking Did With Them

Numbers first, then the complaint. Yugoslavia had 100,000 hectares of vines in the 1980s. Serbia today has 22,000. When the industry was put back together after 2000, it was put back together out of a catalogue: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, new barriques, Bordeaux blends with English names and a London medal on a ribbon round the neck. Falstaff counted 430 registered producers making about 30 million litres in 2021, and I’ll be honest, most of it is fine. Clean, correct, well made. It could also have come from anywhere warm with a decent bank. 

Prokupac and Tamjanika got shoved to the back of the cupboard like grandmother’s dinner service. Can’t throw it out. God forbid you serve it. Then, roughly fifteen years ago, a kind of opposition formed. Natural wine, wine with no make-up on, grown and made to taste like a specific Serbian hillside and not like the inside of an oak barrel. You can count these people on two hands, maybe a foot. They make tiny amounts. And yet theirs is the Serbian wine that actually gets out, to New York, to Chicago, while the Cabernet stays home and wins medals.

The Natural Winemakers of Serbia

Oszkár Maurer. His family came down to the Subotica sands from Salzburg a few generations back. He trained in fruit and vines and made his first wine in 1994, which is to say before anyone in Serbia had heard the phrase “natural wine” in any language. Fifteen hectares, some on Fruška Gora, some in the Subotica–Horgoš sands, and one plot of Kadarka the estate dates to 1880: ungrafted, gnarled, sticking out of the sand like old hands. Serbia spent years calling him a crank. Then his bottles started showing up in Michelin-starred restaurants abroad, and crank was quietly revised to pioneer. Funny how that works. His wines now have a place in the wider conversation around cultural celebrations, where regional traditions and distinctive bottles bring people together.

Ernő Sagmeister is from Kanjiža, right on the Hungarian border. Civil engineer by training, taught maths for a living, spent the early 2000s messing about with wine in his cellar. In 2008 he bought three vineyards on Fruška Gora, 150 km south, on volcanic rock, gravel and limestone. Two things he’s done that nobody else had the stubbornness for: brought Furmint and Hárslevelű back to a mountain that ripped them out in the last century, and got Kadarka written into Serbia’s official register of varieties. Farms organically, biodynamically, no certificate. Says he’s an anarchist and doesn’t trust the people who hand out certificates. Hard to argue.

Estelle and Cyrille Bongiraud, Burgundians, moved into Rogljevo, yes, the village with the stone cellars, and named their wines after virtues: Istina, Tajna, Obećanje. Truth, Secret, Promise. Jamie Goode, the British critic, tasted one of their whites blind and put it down as a serious Loire Chenin. For a village most sommeliers can’t find on a map, I’d take that over any medal. Others worth the hunt: Bikicki, Dalia, Tenuta Est, Kostić, Aleksandar Todorović. Put all of them together, and you still have less vineyard than one Bordeaux château. That’s the whole point.

Where to buy Serbian natural wine in Belgrade

Not the supermarkets. The chains don’t gamble; a good chunk of the public still thinks natural wine is a prank, and there isn’t enough of it to go round anyway. The proper way is a road trip, cellar to cellar, tasting at the source. If you don’t have a spare week for that, there’s one shelf in the city where all of the above sit together: Vinoteka Tipsy, a wine shop in Belgrade in the Vračar district, with Maurer, Sagmeister, Francuska Vinarija, Bikicki and Dalia side by side and delivery across town. Full disclosure, it’s mine. I’d still send you there if it weren’t.

Three bottles to start, one per chapter of this story. A dry Tamjanica, so the incense thing makes sense. A Prokopac with a few years on it, to see what the co-ops were hiding in those tankers. And a Kadarka from Maurer or Sagmeister, to find out what people mean when they say “Serbian Pinot Noir.” After that, you’ll have your own arguments, and the Serbs have a word for that moment too. Da pimnemo.

Author: Andrei Uksusov