At a press conference held at the Vinita wine shop in Osijek, the upcoming Traminer wine festival was presented. The press conference on the “Traminer is Our Favourite” festival heard from festival organisers, Vinko Ručević, the owner of Vinita, and the prominent wine writer Željko Garmaz.
“We are in the final 30 days of countdown until the Traminer festival! If we take into account the programme we have prepared and who will attend the festival, we can be sure that a spectacle is guaranteed. The Traminer festival, which we believe will become an annual tradition, will present Traminer wines produced by more than 70 wineries in Croatia and abroad, including some which have won the International Trophy title at Decanter and 100 points from the great Robert Parker.”
Among them is Domaine Paul Ginglinger from Eguisheim near Colmar, the winner of several of Decanter’s top honours in recent years (two Regional Trophies and an International Trophy!) for the world’s best Traminers. The winery’s owner, Michel Ginglinger, the 13th generation of winemakers from the winery, will personally come and present a lecture on Alsace as one of the world’s top wine regions.
At the large masterclass, which will be the central event of the festival’s first day held in the Old Cellar, Ivan Barbić, the only Master of Wine with a Croatian passport, will analyse the best Croatian Traminer wines and compare them with wines from the four harvests of the Domaine Weinbach winery from Alsace.
Radovan Šuman from Slovenia will host a lecture on biodynamics in viticulture, Danilo Steyer, also from Slovenia, will talk about Traminer as a base wine for the production of sparkling wines, while a famous Slovenian wine writer will present the selection of the best examples of this variety in Slovenia to demonstrate how Traminer has found a new home in the country.
The Winemaking and Viticulture Institute from Pecs will bring several grape varieties that have been developed from Traminer, as well as descendants from the variety that are increasingly sought after in vineyards of the world.
Slavko Kalazić will use his Traminer “vertical” produced from 2007 to 2017 to demonstrate that Baranja is an exceptional terroir from the growing of this variety.
The Iločki Podrumi winery, without which the festival could not be organised, will demonstrate that the Ilok wine area is among the best in the world for producing Traminer wines. Iločki Podrumi is the only winery in the world which makes as many as eight different types of Traminer wines!
The Nećak winery from Petrovac na Mlavi will present its experiences with the production of Traminer as the only winery in the region producing that variety.
In Ilok, Dražen Zečić, a well-known singer and entertainer from Split, will present his Traminer wines, which he has been producing at his Kutjevo vineyard for several years.
The organisers expected that the first edition of the festival, which will be on 14 and 15 June 2019 in Ilok, at the Old Cellar and Principovac, would be well-received, but even they did not foresee such positive reactions from the fans of this wine variety. Just five days after the festival’s programme was announced, the gala dinner by Tom Gretić, his grand return to Croatia, has already been sold out.
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