I'm not counting anymore, breathlessly answered student Marino Štiglić when asked how many times he climbed from the bottom of the vineyard in the Takale vineyard in the Bakar Bay to the road at its top. The two youngest pickers were carrying grapes. Almost a ton and a half were harvested, so each bearer walked the steep path about 40 times carrying a basket with about 20 kilos. If it took them 10 minutes to climb and five minutes to descend, they hiked for ten hours.
We have a hundred-year-old vine. It's down there, at the bottom of the vineyard. And it still bears fruit, said Tomislav Vičević, manager of the Dolčina Agricultural Cooperative. In 2001, the cooperative, together with members of the Praputnjak Cultural and Educational Association, began restoring dry stone walls on the steep Takala above Bakar Bay, carrying soil onto terraces and planting Belina vines, as the indigenous coastal variety Žlahtina is called in this area.
They call it Belina, but it is Žlahtina
We received the grafts from Ivica Dobrinčić's nursery in Vrbnik on Krk. The Vrbnik field made Žlahtina famous, and genetic research at the Zagreb Faculty of Agriculture showed that our Belina is indeed Žlahtina, said Vičević, examining the grapes brought by the younger pickers. They climbed winding, steep paths where even agile goats would have to pull the handbrake to avoid falling into the sea while browsing.
Anyone who has been to Pelješac and visited Dingač vinyards knows what it's like to climb and descend between the vines there. Here it's even harder. I can't say whether the slope is higher than Dingač's 50-degree slope, but it really reminds me of the vineyards above the German Mosel River, where grapes are transported by cable car from the vines to the road where a trailer can reach. There is no cable car here, so it takes ten pickers and two porters more than half a day to pick between a ton and a ton and a half of grapes, depending on the year, and take them to the van. In normal vineyards, a real team can do it in two hours.
Brut sparkling wine
The grapes are nicely sweet, and they are also refreshing when squeezed because they have enough fine acidity that is necessary for a good sparkling wine. They made it as a brut sparkling wine using the classic method of second fermentation in the bottle at the Pavlomir winery in Novi Vinodol, and it is the new Stara Bakarska Vodica which means Old Water from Bakar. About 250 years ago, when the production of sparkling wines, which they called Vodice, began around Bakar and Novi Vinodolski, they made sweet ones
After harvesting and removing the berries from the stalks, they would heat a portion of the must to awaken the natural yeasts and thus stimulate fermentation in the barrels. After the yeasts had converted approximately half of the grape sugar into alcohol, they would stop the fermentation by lifting the wine from the lees and pouring it into large glass bottles that were stored in cold cellars or buried in sand. At the end of winter, before warming, they would pour it into wine bottles. This method is neglected today, and is called the rural method (méthode rurale).
Sparkling for captains, still for peasants
That is how sparkling wines Asti spumante were made in the past in the town of the same name in Piedmont, Italy. In 1989 the European Union listed it as one of the three basic methods for producing sparkling wines, along with the classic method of second fermentation in the bottle and the charmat or tank method in which bubbles are created during the second fermentation in tanks. Families who had vineyards around the Bay of Bakar kept the still wines for themselves and, possibly with special permission from the authorities, sold them on their doorsteps.
They also kept a few bottles of sparkling wine for special occasions but most of them were taken immediately after production was completed, around March after the harvest, to the wealthy families of sea captains who lived in Bakar and paid them dearly. Bakar was then the largest city in present-day Croatia. According to the 1787 census, it had 7,656 inhabitants (Rijeka 5,956, Varaždin 4,814, and Zagreb 2,815). Seventeen years later, in 1804, Bakar had 7,805 people, with the surrounding villages having as many as 14,000, Rijeka 6,655, Varaždin 4,362, and Zagreb 2,973.
Women worked in the vineyard
Intensive grape growing in the Bakar area was encouraged by Empress Maria Theresa in the second half of the 18th century. By clearing forests and planting vines, the Praputnjar's serfs became landowners and were exempt from all taxes for five years. They generated significant income from wine production and the sale of felled wood, wrote Marija Borovičkić in 2008 in her ethnological research Takale: Bakar-Praputnjarski presidi, in which she also states that for years the production of Bakar sparkling wine was mainly done by women
In the 1870s, the emigration of Praputnjak residents to the United States of America began, where the demand for cheap labor in modern industry was growing. Significant waves of emigration of men in search of work went to Malta and the Suez Canal. Many went abroad as sailors or found employment as caulkers – carpenters and shipbuilders – in shipyards around the world. Therefore, for decades, the gender ratio in Praputnjak was extremely unbalanced: in 1890, there were 168 women for every 100 men, in 1910, 171 women, in 1921, 159 women, in 1948, 160 women, and in 1953, 145, Borovičkić reports on the demographic peculiarities of this region.
The real Bakarska vodica
The somewhat clumsy new name Stara Bakarska vodica (Old water from Bakar) is a consequence of decades of production of carbonated wine Bakarska vodica, which many remember from New Year's celebrations in the second half of the 20th century. At midnight, it was almost mandatory to shoot by opening that drink, which, unfortunately, was not good enough for anything else, except for spilling at midnight.
