Zagreb Wine Gourmet Weekend is one of my favorite wine and food shows in Croatia. A great opportunity to see and learn about new trends, wines, olive oils and food but also to meet some old friends and make some new ones.

This year, ZWG was held at wonderful settings of the old Glyptotheque of the Croatian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Zagreb from April 13 to April 15. I decided to visit for one day only due to many other obligations. Early morning drive to was fun and we arrived ready for some food and wine r’n’r.

But before even entering the exhibition halls, we stopped for a quick “bite” at the soup truck at the very entrance.

Not only that their carrot – ginger soup was awesome but I also got to meet Mr. Ozren Drobnjak who is a mastermind behind the Croatia Restaurant Week. Such a great honor! After just a quick soup, we moved on. There were three halls to visit and a lot of wine to taste. But, I decided to limit drinking to the minimum as one can get drunk way too fast on an event like this. We decided to taste only the wines we did not enjoy before and only if they were very interesting and unusual. But you do know that decisions like that are really hard to stick to on events like this? 😉

One of our first stops was at Bolfan wines and that was a nice experience in inner Croatian biodynamic wines enjoying their Riesling and Pinot noir. This is also one of the wineries in Croatia with most international awards.

Next stop Meneghetti but more for their exceptional olive oils as I am quite familiar with their wines. These were some of the best olive oils I had in a while. Not traditional like I usually enjoy but very picant as obviously, picked very green. Really something I see enjoying a lot with all sorts of food!

One of my biggest discoveries were wines from Slovenian wine maker Tilia. And especially their Yellow muscat which is just one superb sweet wine!

But probably the best “new” wine I had were the wines from Veralda winery located in Brtonigla, Istria. Although these wines are quite known among the wine makers, this was my first introduction to them and someone should do better PR as these were much better than most of the better known wine makers.

Of course, we stopped at the tables of Bibich, Trapan, Tomac, Crvik…and several others but these were some of the wines that really impressed me and I enjoyed the most. I only don’t like that the show organizers are not allowing us to buy some wines as that would be great instead of getting all those business cards and instructions.

And as the sun was slowly setting on Zagreb, we were getting ready for more food and wine experiences…