Red From Kaštela

By Patrick R. Dunn

Mike Grgich got to the Napa Valley in 1958, a Croatian who had grown up making wine with his family in a small village on the Dalmatian coast and had left Yugoslavia a few years earlier with very little. Decades later, asked about those first weeks, he told a magazine writer, “first day I saw zinfandel,” and he meant that he recognized it. The grape looked like something from home. He was sure it was kin to Plavac Mali, the dark, thick-skinned red his part of Croatia had grown for generations, and for the next forty years he said so to anyone in California who would listen.

Nobody in California knew where Zinfandel came from. It had reached the East Coast through nursery catalogs in the 1820s and come west with the Gold Rush, and by the time Grgich arrived it was simply California’s grape, growing in old field blends planted by immigrant families from Sonoma to Amador who had stopped asking what it was called anywhere else. In 1967 a USDA plant pathologist named Austin Goheen tasted a Primitivo in Puglia, in the heel of Italy, and thought it looked and tasted a lot like Zinfandel, and in 1994 a plant geneticist at UC Davis named Carole Meredith used DNA fingerprinting to prove they were the same vine. That only moved the mystery across the Adriatic, which was where Grgich had been pointing all along.

In 1997 he talked Meredith into going to look. Croatia was two years out of a war then, and a good deal of its farmland was still seeded with landmines. That same year a Northern California woman named Heidi Kühn started a nonprofit called Roots of Peace to clear minefields and replant them as vineyards, and Grgich became one of its steadiest backers, raising money in Napa to pay for demining in the country he had left. While scientists combed old Dalmatian vineyards for a lost grape, the man who sent them was helping make other Croatian fields safe enough to farm again.

The search went slowly. By coincidence two professors at the University of Zagreb, Edi Maletić and Ivan Pejić, wrote to Meredith that December looking for help with their own work on native Dalmatian varieties, and for four years the three of them sampled hundreds of old vines along the coast and out on the islands. They found dozens of relatives and never the grape itself. Grgich’s Plavac Mali turned out to be family, a child of Zinfandel rather than its parent, which meant the parent was either still out there somewhere or gone. Meredith later called the whole thing “a jigsaw puzzle” with the most important piece missing.

The missing piece was in Kaštel Novi, one of seven old castle towns strung along the bay between Split and Trogir, in a vineyard belonging to a firefighter named Ivica Radunić, whom everyone in town calls Kid. His grandfather had planted part of it the old Dalmatian way, a jumble of local varieties growing side by side and going into the same barrel at harvest without anyone keeping careful track. In the spring of 2001 the Zagreb professors walked his rows, clipping leaves from around fifty of the oldest vines to send to Davis. A handful of them, fewer than a dozen, came back as a perfect match. California had something like 20,000 hectares of Zinfandel in the ground at that moment. In Kaštela the same grape, which the locals called Crljenak Kaštelanski, the red of Kaštela, was down to a few plants hanging on in a family field blend.

The grape turned out to have an older name than any of these. Croatian documents from the 1500s mention a red called Tribidrag that seems to have been prized in its day and then faded out of the vineyards, and the last known trace of it was a single leaf pressed in a herbarium in 1924. Once the DNA tools caught up, the team tested that dried leaf, and it matched too. Long before anyone in California wrote down the word Zinfandel, Dalmatian growers had been making wine from this grape under a name of their own, and then had mostly stopped. The standard reference book Wine Grapes now files it under Tribidrag.

Bringing it back started from almost nothing. In 2003 the university harvested two kilos of Crljenak and made a single bottle of wine, and by 2007 there was enough fruit for a barrel. Today around twenty producers make it, on the mainland around Kaštela and Omiš, inland on the slopes of Biokovo, and out on the island of Brač and the Pelješac peninsula, and the labels still can’t agree on what to call it. Kaštela itself had twenty million vines in 1946 by one local count and has fewer than half a million now, so the grape came home to a place that had largely stopped farming grapes.

Not everyone accepts that the story ends in Kaštela. At a 2017 conference in Split devoted entirely to this one grape, Pejić himself told the room there is still no proof it was born in Croatia, and researchers from Montenegro, where it grows as Kratošija, made it clear they had their own claim. What Kaštela has for certain is the vines that survived, and the question of where the grape first grew is still open between the two countries.

Meredith retired from Davis and now grows Zinfandel with her husband, the winemaker Steve Lagier, on a steep piece of Mount Veeder, and she puts Tribidrag on the label. She told Decanter it was “an important, noble grape,” which is not how most Americans were taught to think about a wine that spent the 1980s in a pink jug. Grgich lived long enough to see his hunch come out half right, the grape Croatian after all and his Plavac Mali its child, and he died in 2024 at 101.

I haven’t stood in Radunić’s rows yet, and I want to. The plan is to get to Dalmatia and taste Crljenak where it was found, in the konobas around Kaštela where it gets poured next to lamb cooked under the peka, before deciding what I think of it. Until then, finding a bottle in the United States takes some looking. Putalj, from the hills above Kaštela, has a following among people who track the grape and turns up at shops that specialize in Croatian wine. Bedalov makes one in Kaštela itself, and Stina’s Tribidrag from the island of Brač is the bottle Croatian wine writers tend to recommend first. The label might say Crljenak, Tribidrag or Zinfandel, and sometimes all three.

Radunić did eventually bottle a Crljenak Kaštelanski from his own vineyard, about five hundred bottles the first time, and he put the whole history of the discovery on the label. According to one Croatian wine site that profiled him, the news that the root of Zinfandel had been found in his rows never brought him a single new customer.