Palaruša – Princess and the Grape

It is only in our cellar that you can taste wine made from the ancient Vis variety of palaruša. It took us 12 years to save it from extinction, to grow it and to bottle it, but it was worth every effort 

Palaruša is one of the indigenous Vis varieties whose preservation we have worked so hard to ensure for more than a decade. As a true princess among our varieties, palaruša is capricious, willful, and complicated. It has a poor crop, so our ancestors planted it in the most barren locations, while a more grateful and cost-effective vugava took all their attention. They were right, palaruša genuinely demands pampering, but its qualities surpass all its possible faults by a hundredfold.

The Most Beautiful Grape Cluster in the World 

For starters, this variety is blissfully insensitive to diseases, so it needs minimal treatment, and its cluster—when you patiently give it a true chance to develop it at all—is a sight that delights. How patient, you ask? A full 12 years of planting, wild rootstock, grafting, and sending to nurseries were necessary to nurture the princess’s grapes for the first 100 liters of wine. But those 100 liters are liquid gold!

Liquid Gold 

This first vintage already showed a fantastic amber color without a day of maceration, which showed us that after seven days of traditional maceration with grape stalks, as it was carried out about 50–100 years ago, this variety could easily age for more than 20 years. Its taste, characterized by an unusual mild astringency for white wines, has supported our suspicions that this wine has the potential for extremely long aging.

A Serious Wine for Special Occasions 

But we are talking about a taste for true connoisseurs here, because this isn’t just another commercial, trendy white wine. This is a wine of serious, heavy taste, a wine that may not be for every day, but the palate remembers every uniquely complex sip. To such an extent that one sip will be enough to easily recognize this wine at every “blind tasting”. Palaruša is simply an unforgettable experience!

More than a decade after our first attempts, we rescued this indigenous variety from extinction, and today we’re bottling it as the only ones on the planet! Stop by our unique cellar and, if you’re really, really good, maybe our grape princess will do you the honor of letting you kiss her glass.