I have a great love for Korta Katarina wines ever since I first tasted them over a year ago. Being a new winery, the success was amazing for these wines especially on small and difficult Croatian market. But, at this moment, Korta Katarina is already a great brand and a well known wine cellar impossible to skip in any recent review or tasting of Croatian wines! They have been present in all good restaurants and they are even available abroad.
So, once our business partner from Montenegro expressed his desire to taste those wines at their cellar, I called my friend Marko (the PR manager of Korta Katarina wine cellar) and had a great “excuse” to go to Orebić. Like one needs an excuse to go to Pelješac 🙂

The wine cellar is part of a whole complex that consists of a wine cellar and a big building that will eventually be a small, boutique hotel. There are still some serious landscaping works going on but that is most likely all finished as I am writing. The location of the wine cellar is at the very entrance to Orebić and just by the sea. Simply stunning!

Now, everything is of beautiful Brac stone and it looks unbelievably classy! Don’t believe the pictures as it is far more impressive in real life!
Good lesson to all “nouveau riche” of Croatia that don’t hesitate to steel old stone to make their properties look old. This property looks great and is of local materials and all done by our stone masons from Brac! Great work!
Next step was, of course, to taste the wine!

First we met the manager, Jeff Reed, a Texan who moved to Orebic and is behind the operations at Korta Katarina. He took us to the wine cellar and I must admit that this place is cleaner than some hospitals! Spotless!
We started with some rose wine before proceeding to the wine tasting area.

Wine tasting area has been recently finished and it is beautiful! It is also very spacious so it can host bigger groups and smaller events. It has a small kitchenette as well for some food preparations and, quite important! – it has the view of Postup area and the very vineyards of Korta Katarina. Great when explaining the wine making in the area.

We tasted all of Korta Katarina wines: Rose, Plavac Mali and fabulous Pošip. The key to great wines is, of course, in great grapes and the staff here takes special care of their vineyards and the vineyards of their cooperates. The entire process is controlled to make sure that the grapes give the wine of the best quality. At Korta Katarina, they also keep their wine at French oak barrels again as a very controlled process making sure that the taste is just improved by keeping wine in barrels and the taste of wood does not become overwhelming.

This visit to this winery will definitely be a highlight for our upcoming 2011 wine tours from Dubrovnik area!
Together with our wine tours of traditional Peljesac wine cellars, we are planning to start something that would focus on new winemakers in this area but still a long way from finishing the program as not all of the new winemakers have wine cellars…

For all of you who love Korta Katarina wines, now you can see, on these few photos, where this fabulous wine comes from!

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