In our work, we try to socialize regularly and promote our wines. And wines are best tasted with appropriate food. Our promotion in the Homa restaurant was accompanied by a wine portal vino.rs
“An exceptional summer experience in the famous restaurant Homa on Dorćol, even two white Fruško Gora verticals by Trivanović with the specialties of the chef Filip Ćirić made us announce ourselves in the style of raunchy Latins with Homa hominum vinum, or in translation: Homa for men’s wine!
The infernal heat made the sweaty drops on the bottles cooled in fancy metal cans with the role of wine buckets stand out even more. Wanting to see how the Pinot Grigio and Grašac varieties wines taste on the hot asphalt, we asked the owner of the winery, Ivan Trivanović, to bring the latest Pinot Grigio 2021 and Optimus grašac 2021 vintages from Šid, and the kitchen maestro Ćirić to prepare something with them that will not burden us and again challenging the wines to resist the flavors and aromas of the dishes of a chef known for his often exotic combinations of ingredients and spices.
The restaurant garden, which was among the first from Belgrade to enter the famous Michelin gastronomic guide, is slowly filling up. Foreign languages are almost exclusively heard around us and foreigners almost without exception drink wine. They try Serbian sparkling wines and even orange ones to our great, pleasant surprise. But here he is, Ivan, Trivanović is carrying a large number of bottles. So is it possible? We will have two verticals at 34 degrees Celsius in the afternoon!”
No matter how much you plan, something always comes up at the last minute. Of course, it was the same this time…
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Sorry for being late, – he says – I came across my Grigio from the 2019 vintage in a store, which I don’t have in the archive, and I had to buy it to try it.
Sorry for being late, – he says – I came across my Grigio from the 2019 vintage in a store, which I don’t have in the archive, and I had to buy it to try it.
He sits down at the table and writes something in his phone, in the reminder. He explains how he mostly does all the work in the winery himself with his small team, how he spent a whole week bottling new shiraz and that he only now realizes that he didn’t leave any wine in the archive this year either. Well, if he doesn’t write it in the reminder now, it will pass like the 2019 vintage, without a single bottle to remember. Because all these white wines are sold without the rest.
Eager to start analyzing the wines while the dishes are being prepared, we somewhat shyly explain to the friendly girls from Homa, who, to our delight, keep pouring water and ice into our glasses, that there won’t be just two wines, but actually seven. Pinot Grigio from the vintages of 2018, 2019 (this one just bought), 2020 and 2021 (still without a label), and then Optimus grašac 2018, 2020 and 2021.
Less than a minute later, the table is literally covered with premium glasses of the desired dimensions, as befits a restaurant that pays special attention to wine culture and supply.”
It was necessary to point out some things that only we at the winery know.
“- I have only one condition – starts Ivan – that we pay special attention to the 2018 and 2019 vintages…
Why? We will find out about 60 minutes later when we swirl the chilled wine in front of our nose and then pour it over our palate. It will be a very clear and interesting experience. Just as the service on the table is interesting, they would say a welcome bite. Artistically served mature cream covered with small edible herbs, flower decorations, tempts us to swallow it immediately.
There is also integral bread with nuts, seeds and raisins or white bread with olives. Both variants are finger-licking, and in glasses, Pinot Grigio, the first in line and the freshest two vintages of the variety that Ivan has been making since 2013.
Pinot is essentially a universal wine whose strong aromas can withstand even spicy Asian food, so we don’t expect there to be any problems with cream. Especially since the structure of the wine can be buttery if it has a little more alcohol.
And indeed, the 2021 vintage, delicious on the nose, is finely permeated with the fats of cream, it goes wonderfully with white bread with olives, and with the latter it is like an aromatic delicacy.”
Food is inseparable from wine. Each of those two in itself is only a small part of the story. Only together do they make a fairy tale…
“Restaurant manager Jelena Pejčić masterfully balances various vintages, bottles, wine buckets and ice while explaining what is on the plates:
– These are Saint-Jacques medallions served on cauliflower and coconut milk cream with cauliflower snow and a raspberry vinegar, soy sauce and chive oil dressing. The second dish is farro from sprouted wheat with pine nuts, prunes and oyster mushrooms. There’s some vegan bacon that we make from chickpeas, beets and stuffed peppers while it’s all in an espuma (foam) of corn, green curry and coconut milk, just right for a sweet and spicy dish.
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Even in 2020, the grijo wanted to “run away” from us for one day, he almost caught a lot more alcohol – suddenly Ivan intervenes while we are swirling glasses. – Especially with that variety, that one day can be a total disaster. in an instant, sugars and phenological maturity increase and acids decrease. With other grapes, the sugar jumps by 0.2 in one day, while with Pinot it is five times more!
Even in 2020, the grijo wanted to “run away” from us for one day, he almost caught a lot more alcohol – suddenly Ivan intervenes while we are swirling glasses. – Especially with that variety, that one day can be a total disaster. in an instant, sugars and phenological maturity increase and acids decrease. With other grapes, the sugar jumps by 0.2 in one day, while with Pinot it is five times more!
The last two vintages are some crazy Tanja’s (oenologist Tatjana Đuričić) and my “mixing” where we literally made two separate wines: the first structural, the second aromatic. And then we mixed it to get a bomb, with beautiful fruity notes and a strong body at the same time, which was not possible before when we did everything together.
Indeed, the 2018 and 2019 vintages have a thinner body and slightly less pronounced fruitiness, but with great elegance and herbality, which we assume will be especially pleasing with the gentler sequence of food that consists of shellfish. Although there is no sugar, the extremely compatible vintages 2020 and 2021 offer a nice dose of sweetness on the nose where the older one is more open and seemingly with higher acids but that is because the 2021 has a touch more alcohol that fakes sweetness.
All in all everything is below 13% alcohol. After the exotic aromas on the nose, clear candy and bubble gum aromas follow in the heavy finish, but the wine from 2019 is a big surprise and clearly one of the turning points in the Pinot Grigio Trivanović style.
– Recently, I drank chardonnay from Montana winery Hess, this same vintage, and it reminded me incredibly of my Grigio – reveals Ivan. – Herbal, fresh herbs, goes phenomenally with bread with walnuts, where it brings out the sweetness. But the pinot has a thinner body, it is supported by acids, but it is weaker on the nose. This is exactly why, in agreement with Tanja, we turned around in the 2020 vintage, because herbality is the main note of the grigio if it is done in the right way, but we looked for something more “that”. We were in Italy, tried about twenty wines of this variety to see the direction we should go, but they were all similar, too little complexity. Until we came across one from the Alto Adige region when I said: That’s it, that’s what I want! And in the last two vintages, we made exactly that, a grigio that absolutely jumped out from the Serbian wines of the same variety.”
Oh, it was wonderful!
“Fruitiness stands out from the complex of exotic notes, primarily maybe melon, which goes fantastically with Saint-Jacques. Fruitiness, freshness and drinkability call for more, while the structured wine perfectly permeates and makes the loose farro more compact, and the acidity of the raspberry vinegar further highlights the wine’s attributes. In the case of the 2019 vintage, the situation is reversed, herbal tones cover the soft meat of the shell in a joint dance, which is even more pronounced through the special elegance of the wine from 2018, and both older vintages raise the homemade breads to a higher level of enjoyment.
– I would eat this farro by myself, I like it so much, the only thing that is wrong is to give a man from Srem a vegan bacon, – laughs Ivan – but I wouldn’t eat the shell without wine.
The green color of the wine announces the greenish notes of herbalism in the latest gra[ac harvest Optimus 2021, but it is the yellow apple skin that draws attention. The wine seems simpler than the Pinot Grigio, but Trivanović warns that he really wished for that difference. The letters on the label are also greener…
– The label is not the right one because the wine will be on sale soon, we only printed it to send it to the GROW du Monde gra[ac championship in Novi Sad where it won silver. Silver from the AWC evaluation in Vienna is also won by gra[ac and grigio from the 2019 harvest, and I only send wines to Vienna. This year I submitted both whites and a Shiraz from the 2018 vintage, so if it wins gold, it will go to Decanter next year.
Ivan worked on Grašac in 2016, but gave up for a while because there was no interest until Tanja arrived at the winery and the Optimus story began in 2018.
– If there were no Chinese and tourists in Belgrade in 2018, not a single gra[ac would have been sold in restaurants, such was the animosity towards the variety. Novi Sad is a slightly different story, especially since the same people from Belgrade in Croatia drink graševina or the same gra[ac with pleasure. In Ilok or Osijek, the wine list first includes 10 grašac wines, then any other variety, while in Zagreb, the case is different. By the way, when Tanja came to the winery, she saw the grašac vineyard, we agreed on which direction to go. And when we got the wine, we spent a lot of time thinking about what to call it.
Let him be Optimus, thought Ivan, because the Romans brought the first vines to Fruška Gora. Then the name swirling started with the transformers whose leader is Optimus Prime. However, the name remained, and already the first tastings in Crown Plaza and the wine shop Podrum Wine Art, where the experts gathered, revealed that a turnaround in the assessment of the decades-proven variety is on the horizon. Because Optimus offered something new due to its strong structure, juicy acids and special sweetness on the nose, very reminiscent of a top sauvignon interface in a great white wine company. After that, the sale starts.
Optimus 2021, even the one a year older, has sharp acids, a simpler but very precise body with a dose of minerality that all Trivanović wines possess. A true summer wine that assumes a certain sweetness on the smell, and offers green apples on the taste. It has as much as 6.6 g/l of sugar, which, along with the high, juicy acids, is not only felt, but also nicely sticks to the mouth. The “legendary” vintage of 2018 holds up well, it seems that it is really completely different and more elegant, but that is a reflection of the past years and a slight change in the aromatic layers.
Grašac go practically perfectly with both courses of food, with the newer vintages being more sensitive with Saint-Jacques, while the 2018 is a wine for contemplation that turns into a dessert with the aforementioned breads. What kind of technology was applied so that Optimus got rid of the evil “influence” of Italian Riesling, we ask Ivan?
– In 2018, practically nothing was done on the wine, it is a pure imprint of the terroir and simply, God looked at us. “
