Top 100 red wines of Serbia - Page 4

Discovering the wine region of Serbia

Serbia is a country in Southeastern Europe, geographically the largest of the former Yugoslav states and still the most productive in terms of wine. Like its southern neighbour, the Republic of Macedonia, Serbia is landlocked. It has no less than eight international borders, or potentially nine, depending on whether Kosovo is considered independent. It Lies between the Northern latitudes of 41 and 47 degrees, which places it comfortably in the "wine belt", i.

e. the latitudes in which quality winemaking is considered possible. In Western Europe, this location corresponds to the area bounded by the Loire Valley in France to the north and the Duero River in Spain (where Rueda and Ribera del Duero are located) to the south. In terms of topography, the country is very varied, ranging from 600 to 2150 metres in altitude.

The greatest contrast is between the province of Vojvodina in the north, which lies entirely in the Pannonian plain of Central Europe, and the Carpathians in the east. Serbian wine regions are not as clearly defined as those of countries with a more developed wine industry. Broadly speaking, the main wine-growing areas of the country follow the course of the Grape/velika">VelikaMorava River as it approaches its confluence with the Danube, 120 km north of its point of origin at Stalac, in central Serbia. The Velika Morava should not be confused with the longer Morava, which rises in Moravia (the region of the Czech Republic to which it gives its name) and flows into the Danube just west of Bratislava in western Slovakia.