Blatina

Blatina is a red grape of Herzegovina, grown on the same white limestone around Mostar as Žilavka, and it has a botanical problem that shapes everything about how it is farmed. Its flowers are functionally female: the vine cannot pollinate itself, so a Blatina vineyard planted alone sets almost no fruit.

Growers there have a word for the result, praznobačvaš, which means roughly the empty barrel man. The fix is to interplant a pollinator, and the usual choices are Alicante Bouschet, Merlot or the local Trnjak, at somewhere between one vine in five and one in ten. Even then the crop is unreliable, because cold or wet weather at flowering will still cost the year.

The wine repays the trouble modestly. It is medium bodied and dark, with sour cherry, dried plum and a herbal, slightly rustic edge, and moderate tannin. It is the everyday red of the region in the way that Žilavka is the everyday white, and the two are almost always made by the same cellars.