Alison and I have some wine most evenings at home, so we have done the same on our travels in the Balkans. As at home, generally but not exclusively dry reds, and not expensive.
Everywhere has had decent selections in the supermarkets, as they all have pretty relaxed licensing laws, both in price and variety. We've tried to keep to local wines to the country we are in, and where possible local varieties that we wouldn't get at home. That means excluding the shelves of cheap Italian and Spanish that you see everywhere. Also Jacob's Creek, which it appears has made a big name for itself in this part of the world. There has been some NZ wine too, but not a lot.
That means we've tried Frankovka Modra, Svätovavrinecké, Refošk and a whole lot of other varieties I can't remember. They've mostly been pretty good, fairly hearty if unsophisticated.
But mistakes have been made!
We haven't bought anything truly nasty, because we have minimum as well as maximum prices. Five litre containers of wine rather too closely resembling cooking oil have not been on our list. While I think the carry-handles are a nice touch, I'm not sure my stomach is up for $2 per litre Riesling.
The bottling conventions, however, have caused issues. Most wine is sold in 750 ml bottles, as at home, but in the former Yugoslav republics they mix these with ones that are a full litre, which lead to buying rather more than I wanted before I learned to check the size carefully.
Quite a lot of the white wine is bottled using different bottling conventions.
I was just about to buy a bottle of the Tramin Cerveny above, when I noticed that it was alongside Chardonnay. Sure enough despite the darkness and shape of the bottles, these are white wines.
Twice I have made this mistake, being so used to red wine in this type of bottle, to a rather rude surprise. Not because it is white wine, because we don't mind, but because in the very warm weather we've been having, warm cheapish white wine isn't quite so pleasant.
In this case being labelled in English we weren't going to fall for buying a sweet when we wanted a dry, but most are not labelled in English. After a rather unfortunate accident of this type, there has been some furious Googling of "sweet" and "dry" in order to avoid a repeat.
Provided we carefully check we are buying what we think we are buying, it has been good though.
The beer is much more reliable. The default is always a lager of some sort, sometimes a Pilsner, which suits us fine. Often it's cheaper than soft-drink.
Everywhere has had decent selections in the supermarkets, as they all have pretty relaxed licensing laws, both in price and variety. We've tried to keep to local wines to the country we are in, and where possible local varieties that we wouldn't get at home. That means excluding the shelves of cheap Italian and Spanish that you see everywhere. Also Jacob's Creek, which it appears has made a big name for itself in this part of the world. There has been some NZ wine too, but not a lot.
That means we've tried Frankovka Modra, Svätovavrinecké, Refošk and a whole lot of other varieties I can't remember. They've mostly been pretty good, fairly hearty if unsophisticated.
But mistakes have been made!
This is in Montenegro, this is six euros for five litres
The bottling conventions, however, have caused issues. Most wine is sold in 750 ml bottles, as at home, but in the former Yugoslav republics they mix these with ones that are a full litre, which lead to buying rather more than I wanted before I learned to check the size carefully.
Quite a lot of the white wine is bottled using different bottling conventions.
I was just about to buy a bottle of the Tramin Cerveny above, when I noticed that it was alongside Chardonnay. Sure enough despite the darkness and shape of the bottles, these are white wines.
Twice I have made this mistake, being so used to red wine in this type of bottle, to a rather rude surprise. Not because it is white wine, because we don't mind, but because in the very warm weather we've been having, warm cheapish white wine isn't quite so pleasant.
I did not know that Merlot came in Rosé. I also didn't know that it came in a sweet red variety.
In this case being labelled in English we weren't going to fall for buying a sweet when we wanted a dry, but most are not labelled in English. After a rather unfortunate accident of this type, there has been some furious Googling of "sweet" and "dry" in order to avoid a repeat.
Provided we carefully check we are buying what we think we are buying, it has been good though.
The beer is much more reliable. The default is always a lager of some sort, sometimes a Pilsner, which suits us fine. Often it's cheaper than soft-drink.
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