So my wife is from Krosno - a medium sized town in the Carpathian region of southeast Poland. We go there maybe twice a year to visit family. The region is known to have some tradition of growing grapes and making wine (in fact a Scot, one Robert Gilbert Porteous of Dalkieth made his fame as a wholesale wine trader on behalf of the Polish king in the early 17th century. His portrait can still be seen in the church in Krosno) but I had thus far been unable to tap the surface of this slowly fermenting industry. None of the regions wines are readily available in shops, and i had never seen or heard of any producers in particular. This trip, for the sake of my dear readers, was going to be different.
The first and most obvious port of call was the local wine shop in Krosno - a great little shop called Wino Przyjaciele or 'Wine and Friends' where I found the very keen and helpful Adam. When asked about the local wine, Adam told me "We have a problem. To buy Podkarpacki Wino you must spend about 90zł (£20) which is enough for a nice Barolo, and it's not so good." That explained why I'd never seen it in shops but didn’t get me very far forward in my quest.
Next, some internet research pinpointed a few nearby vineyards so off we went. We drove around a while. These were small villages of big houses with small patches of corn, sunflowers on their land. On the edge of the village of Jedlicze we stopped and asked a man in a smart suit who was walking into the village if he knew of a vineyard locally. He did, and promptly jumped in the car beside us. The address we had was indeed a vineyard. Of sorts. Three rows of vines, maybe three plants on each then a washing line, then a house. No luck.
After some more roaming around and another unsuccessful visit to someone’s house, we finally got lucky. Off the road out of Jasło, up on the hill was a sizable looking patch of nice bushy green vines. There was no winery. There wasn't even a sign, but the gate was unlocked so we went in.
A sandy clay south-facing slope, about the size of a football field, sheltered by hills to the north and thick trees on each side. A pretty place. Frustrating as it was to have no information whatsoever, it really was great to be amongst the vines. There seemed to be a lot of experimentation, with almost every row of vines varying in grape variety or training method or canopy management. Some old vines, some young, some high yields, some low. Being mid July, veraison had not yet occurred and so I couldn't tell if any red grapes were amongst those planted.
I left with the satisfaction that someone in the region was seriously growing grapes - but where was the wine? I hoped the upcoming Winna Góra 2011 wine festival would yield some results.
The festival was a showcase of two vineyards – one Austrian and one Hungarian – hosted by the guys from Wino Przyjaciele in Krosno. The setup was interesting: a deposit was paid for a glass then you paid to taste each wine. Unfortunately this meant using the same glass for all wines and full glasses were poured making it fairly difficult to seriously taste the wines. It was lots of fun though and while I tried some nice stuff, I won't go into too much detail about the wines here.
Then finally, just as we were getting ready to leave I spotted it… Polish wine! For sale! Produced locally! I snapped it up. I had trailed around the region searching high and low for the local plonk and at last, two days before my flight back to Edinburgh, I had some.
How was it? I hear you ask. Look out for Part III – Tasting Notes very soon!
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