What is then the characteristics of vranec? It is certainly a grape (and a wine) with its own personality. Sometimes, the country promoters label it as “the black stallion”. I’m not sure what that is supposed to mean in terms of wine, so I’d rather leave that to the side. Typically, it makes very dark, well-structured wines with lots of tannins and aromas of dark fruit, violets, and sometimes dark red flowers, but it varies a lot. To explain it in another way, as I do in the video below, you can perhaps describe it as a grape that combines the characters of two of the world’s most famous grapes, syrah, with power and spice, and nebbiolo, with intense acidity and tannins.

But the real expert on vranec is, of course, Zvonko, “Vranec is difficult to tame, so you need to work a lot with this grape variety in order to tame the tannins, which are very high and can be very, very harsh. So, that’s why it usually goes into the barrel, ageing to polish it for a long time. Also, the bottle aging as well, to become softer. When it’s young, it has black fruit, aromas of blackberries, and some hint of garrigue. We usually make bâtonnage or punching down, malacotic fermentation as well, which is when the secondary notes develop. These wines are very high in acidity, can go up to 9.5 in some cases, from higher altitude, which means that it has good structure and has potential for longer bottle ageing. Tertiary notes are usually like mocha or coffee, or chocolate. It can be dried fruits, dried plums, which make more opulent aromas and flavours of this great variety; so, I will say that is amazing. You can enjoy many layers of these wines.”

Few people have tasted as many vranec wines as Zvonko Herceg, so he should know. If you can find some vranec from Northern Macedonia—or vranac from any of the other Balkan countries—try it yourself. It is definitely worth exploring. And you will be a pioneer in discovering this unusual grape variety from this unusual Balkan country.

We import two wines made from Vranec grapes.

Vranec Semi-Dry is kept in kept in oak barrels for 6 months and a small amount of unfermented vranec grape juice is mixed in so that the wine is a little softer and has a lower alcohol percentage.

Vranec is kept in oak barrels fo 12 months and is full bodied wine with a little higher alcohol content. A true Macedonian dry red wine to enjoy.

Full write-up here, unfortunately they use North Macedonia instead of Macedonia.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/karlsson/2024/09/09/an-experts-explanation-of-the-wines-of-north-macedonia/