Tikveš Babuna Red 2023
£20.75
The wine
A bold and full-bodied wine with aromas of blackberry, cherry and baked plum giving way to violet. Dry, with refreshing acidity and fine-grained tannins. Flavours of pomegranate, sour cherry and raspberry linger on the succulent finish.
Babuna is the river that runs through the Tikveš valley, and this is the estate's most ambitious red. Vranec provides the colour and structure, Shiraz the pepper and dark fruit, and Plavec is the curiosity: a native Macedonian variety grown almost nowhere else and rarely seen in a bottle. At 15 per cent it is a substantial wine, which the valley's 260 days of sun a year readily explain.
The producer
Tikveš
View all Tikveš winesTikveš has been making wine in North Macedonia since 1885 and is the largest producer in south-eastern Europe, farming around 1,000 hectares in the Tikveš valley in the centre of the country.
North Macedonia is one of Europe's last undiscovered wine countries, which is a surprise given the history: vines have grown here since at least the fourth century BC, and the region supplied wine to Yugoslavia in enormous quantity through the twentieth century, mostly in bulk and mostly anonymously. Independence in 1991 and the collapse of that trade forced a rethink, and the shift towards bottling under its own name has been rapid.
The indigenous varieties are the reason to pay attention. Vranec, whose name means black stallion, is the flagship red, deeply coloured and powerfully structured. Kratoshija is genetically identical to Primitivo and Zinfandel. Smederevka and Temjanika are the native whites, the latter a member of the Muscat family. The valley's continental climate and 260 days of sun a year ripen all of them readily.
