Tikveš Vranec Luda Mara 2023
£14.75
The wine
Deep purple in colour. Intense flavours of spicy blackberry, black cherry and blueberry intermingle with pomegranate and hints of dried herbs. Complex, with well-integrated warmth and firm tannins.
Vranec is North Macedonia's flagship red and its name means black stallion, which gives a fair impression of the wine. It is deeply coloured, high in tannin and rich in anthocyanins, and it needs the long, hot Tikveš summers to ripen properly. Luda Mara is the premium range, and the grape is closely related to Montenegro's Vranac, the two names differing only by dialect.
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.
