Andrew Jefford is inspired by one epic bottle of 2020 Kiridžija Dingač M, Dalmatia, Croatia.
Might “epic wine” exist? Surely not. The origins of epic lie in oral narrative poetry, often of great antiquity; storytelling via a series of sequential episodes forms its fabric. It was these highly colored episodes, links in the epic chain, that enabled vast works to be memorized and retold. Rhyme, rhythm, and repetition kept bards at their performative peak—and listeners agog around the fire.
Tragedy, according to Aristotle, “endeavors, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun … whereas the Epic action has no limit of time”.1 Indeed not, either within or without the poem. We are still adding to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the earliest of all epics, as new Assyrian clay-tablet fragments are found and their cuneiform decoded.2 The Western literary canon is founded on the Homeric epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey, works whose literary perfection seems to defy the idea of oral origin: inspiration for our most industrious poets since, notably Virgil, Dante, and Milton. For length, though, nothing can approach the Indian Mahabharata: around 1.8 million words, it is ten times the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.3 If wine has an equivalent, it would be not one but every vintage ever made from the fruit of a long-circumscribed vineyard: Clos de Vougeot, perhaps, whose vines were enclosed by walls as long ago as 1336. We continue to drink this epic today.
Don’t, though, forget the film epics: Ben-Hur, Gone With the Wind, Seven Samurai, Star Wars, Titanic, The Lord of the Rings … add your own nominations. Spectacular settings, historical contexts and conflicts, elaborate musical scores, and a lavish and starry cast help define the genre. Subtle? Not necessarily. Deft and elegant? Hardly. Stirring and endearing? That’s more like it. Mentally overwhelming and emotionally wrenching? At times, absolutely. Perhaps we can imagine an epic wine in this sense: rich, powerful, multi-dimensioned, and comforting, from spectacular vineyards, made by an extraordinary winemaker laboring through a fierce summer under siege from Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun.
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Beautiful bigness
If so, here it is, our film-epic wine: Vedran Kiridžija’s Dingač M. From Trieste south to Zakynthos and the western Peloponnese is a journey of around 800 miles (1,300km). Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece: blag your way onto a yacht, hug the coastline of the Eastern Adriatic and Ionian Seas, and you’ll unravel Europe’s most spectacular chain of islands, peninsulas, fjords, lagoons, isthmuses, cliffs, and canyons. You will, sporadically along this long journey, see vineyards. Croatia’s Dingač, granted an appellation in 1961, may well be the greatest vineyard zone of the entire six-nation shoreline.
The 79ha (195 acres) of Dingač vines belong to the Pelješac peninsula, attached to the mainland by a flimsy hinge. These steeply ramping vineyards soar between the villages of Trstenik and Podubuče, rising 1,000ft (300m) up the otherwise sparsely vegetated karst limestone in two giant strips. Most of the winegrowers (including Vedran Kiridžija) live in the hill-top village of Potomje, over the crest of the mountain and connected to the peninsula’s axial road. Harvesting these grapes was for centuries a struggle, since they had to be brought up and over the ridge line along goat paths, strapped to donkeys. Potomje local Vice Miličić organized, via the local wine co-operative, the building of a 440-yard (400m) tunnel through the mountain; when it was opened in 1975, it reduced a 12-mile (20km) hike to a 2.5-mile (4km) drive. The tunnel itself is like something out of The Lord of the Rings: dark, single-track, the rock walls hacked roughly, a disconcerting passage through the underworld. When you emerge on the seaward side, the view across the strait drops away beneath you as the road veers sharply to left and right. Perfect for a Bond car chase: epics to come.
The wine is made from Plavac Mali grapes: Croatia’s hero red variety (though who knows what one of its parents, the little-grown but densely compelling Dobričić, might one day be capable of?) Bush vines are obligatory in Dingač, and ripen extravagantly; the 15.5% ABV carried by this wine is necessary and succulent, part of its beautiful bigness, its extravagant embrace. The wine has a sweet, luxury-sedan nose, which made me suspect American oak when I first sniffed it. There is none: this is its innate lusciousness of fruit, driven as often as not by the 10% or so of dried grapes that Sol Invictus insists on bestowing (though the wine is indeed oaked, in new medium-toast French barrels, from Seguin-Moreau, Radoux, Nadalié, and Boutes). Its balance comes not from acidity, which is low; instead it’s the magnificent suite of tannins and extracts that lend tone and definition to its flesh, and that ballast and anchor its heady fruit. Epic was the word that kept coming to mind as we drank it. Don’t wander into a glass of Dingač looking for classical perfection and chiseled restraint; surrender instead to its well of fruited emotion, the swirling melodies of its raisin-and-truffle embrace, the grandeur and resolution of its tannic presence.
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I tried a 2018 and a 2008 Dingač on our visit to Vedran Kiridžija: Stow these wines, and the overt sweetness of youth dissipates, as sentiment does in a film built around a great script, to be replaced by something meatier, more herbal and more rooty; the tannins, meanwhile, soften and swim together, though they continue to give the wine its frame and focus. No limit of time? Eventually, no doubt, there must be, but these little liquid epics will endure for a decade or two en route.
NOTES
1. Aristotle, Poetics, Part V, trans. S H Butcher.
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh, trans. Andrew George (Penguin Books, 2020), Introduction p.xxxii.
3. The Complete Mahabharata, trans. Ramesh Menon.
