Grgić

Few wine stories carry as much weight as that of Miljenko "Mike" Grgić, a man born in 1923 in the Dalmatian village of Desne, who left the then Yugoslavia in 1954 and became one of the most influential winemakers in the world in California. In 1976, as the chief oenologist of the Chateau winery, Grgić Montelena , created a Chardonnay that beat the best French wines at a historic blind tasting competition in Paris, an event that Napa Valley forever placed among the world's leading wine regions. A year later, he founded his own winery, Grgich Hills , and in 1980 his 1977 Chardonnay won the largest blind tasting of single-varietal wines ever held, earning him the nickname "King of Chardonnay". However, despite his worldwide fame, Grgić returned to his native Dalmatia in 1996 and founded the Grgić Vina winery in Trstenik on the Pelješac peninsula, overlooking the Adriatic Sea, together with his daughter Violet and nephew Ivo Jeramaza . His goal was to prove to the world the potential of the indigenous Croatian varieties, Plavac Mali and Pošip, and in 2001, in collaboration with a professor from Davis University, he helped prove that Californian Zinfandel originated from the Dalmatian variety Crljenak Kaštelanski.