14. the wine tasting

Part of the attraction of the Fruska Gore region is, or so claims the tourist information centre, the local wine. Which is why they have established no less than six wine routes. We like wine a lot, but we are not going to do six wine routes. Instead, my travel companion had selected a few wineries to visit, based on the rather generic descriptions of all of them.

part of the wine route, or one of the many wine routes

The first one on the list was Quet, in the village of Banostor. Looks good from the outside, modern, professional tasting area, balcony. Inside we were received by a Serbian lady, very friendly, ahh, but no English, and no, no other European languages. Croatian, a little, but that doesn’t help. But even before we could start to improvise, a Chinese young woman walks in, asking “Can I help?” in perfect English. Yeah, a colleague had told her that there were foreigners, so she though, perhaps I can be of use. Language barrier solved.

our language saviour – no, not the haphazard tourist this time, but the Chinese Li Wang, who spoke perfect English

Tasting then. Well, we can, but the options are either three, or five glasses, and not a little wine, but three, or five, full glasses. Each. And full glasses in Serbia, they are really full! Hmm. I still need to drive to Belgrade, of course, later today. No, there are no open bottles of which we can taste a little sip. But you know, our Chinese friend, Li Wang, suggests she can tap two small glasses from the tank in which they keep the Cuvee, a white blend of several grapes. Why not? And the Cuvee is really nice, straight from the tank, definitely one of the better Serbian wines we have had so far. And Li turns out to be really nice, too, we chat for another 20 minutes, or so, about wine, about her unusual trip from China, around the world, ending up in Serbia – after she did an internship in Albania, of all places! In the end we bought three bottles, blind, on Li’s recommendation, including an unlabelled blend that was still a little fizzy – “you know, Serbians don’t like that very much, so we cannot sell them anyhow”, Li says. For our apartment stay in Belgrade they will do. And they didn’t disappoint.

The other wineries were either difficult to find, or already closed, so we skipped further tasting in Fruska Gore. Wine tasting doesn’t become more unusual than our Quet experience.

the stainless steel tanks of Quet winery

tasting utensils in the tasting room

in the end, the wines were a little disappointing – Serbian wines are just not so good

ruins of Saint Rudolph’s Church