Graševina, Croatia's crucial Welschriesling

There is officially a total of 21,000 ha (51,890 acres) of vineyard in Croatia (there were 170,000 ha before phylloxera struck) but the average holding is tiny. When travelling around Split, where I went in late April for the Tribidrag conference, I certainly noticed that many households seemed to cultivate just a few rows of vines, along with other crops, and in the countryside it was common to encounter a small block of vines surrounded by grassland. 

We were assured that the most significant recent progress in Croatian agriculture has been in wine. To satisfy EU wine bureaucracy, in...