KOSTA BOTUNJAC: You Can Take Everything from Me, but Never My Notebook

The yellowed postcard arrived in 1942 from a camp in Germany. Dragomir Botunjac had not written about how he was, what he lacked or when he might return. Instead, he left his family instructions for harvesting the grapes without him and making red wine from that wartime vintage.

For a long time, Kosta Botunjac did not know the postcard existed. When he found it, almost sixty years after it had been written, he recognised far more in those few lines than an old winemaking recipe. A man imprisoned far from home, uncertain of his own fate, had been thinking about the vineyard and trying to make life easier for those who remained in Župa.

“When you hear a story like that and establish that it’s true, you have to see it as an obligation. That man was in a camp, thinking about the vineyard and how to help us make wine.”

Kosta still combines the postcard’s instructions with the knowledge he has since acquired, modern oenology and what he calls nature’s golden rules. They also inform the making of his Pino Botunjac. He is not trying to make a twenty-first-century wine exactly as it was made during the Second World War. Rather, he believes science does not invalidate ancestral experience. It can explain it, refine it and carry it forward without necessarily replacing it.

Dragomir was not the only winemaker in the family tree. Kosta’s great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather and both grandfathers had all grown vines. His other grandfather, Dragoljub Marković, was one of the region’s leading winemakers between the world wars, and an award certificate for his wine survives from 1932. Kosta thus grew up in a family where winegrowing did not begin with a decision to start a business. It was inherited along with the land, stories and obligations towards people who were no longer there.

Yet he did not take the shortest route to the vineyard. He worked for a state-owned company for thirty years, making wine alongside his job whenever time allowed. The family tradition was always present, but it had not yet become his entire life. The decision gradually took shape until, one day, he stood before a mirror and recited his ancestors to himself.

“I said, ‘Kosta, your great-great-grandfather, great-grandfather, maternal grandfather and paternal grandfather all worked with vines. Go back to your land, to the vineyard, and do what’s in you.’”

And so he did. He was not starting from scratch. The land, family memory and the 1942 postcard were waiting. The postcard did not say that one day he would become a winemaker. It simply explained how to make red wine. Everything else he had to discover himself.

Kosta did not decide to continue the family tradition merely by repeating what his ancestors had done. Had he wanted a safer path, he could have found one in Župa without much searching. Instead, he chose a variety reputed to punish every mistake, both in the vineyard and in the cellar.

He chose Pinot Noir.

“I wanted a challenge, so I chose the hardest thing. Pinot Noir is one of the most demanding varieties to grow and make into wine. But if you succeed, you get the finest red wine.”

In Kosta’s understanding, Pinot is never finished. It changes in barrel, continues living in bottle and, he says, undergoes minute processes for as long as it exists. That is why he describes it as a devil in a bottle: you never know when it will test you, deceive you or reward you. One of his favourite quips grew out of this relationship with the variety.

“Pinot is good for women when men drink it, and Riesling is good for men when women drink it.”

His response to the variety’s demands was not to subdue it in the cellar with ever more aggressive technology. He organised harvesting and initial processing in the vineyard, and designed the cellar around gravity. The wine passes through three stations at different levels without pumping, from fermentation and maceration to settling. It encounters a pump only at bottling, and even then the pump runs so slowly that, as Kosta puts it, it does not break up the wine’s structure.

His vineyards cover just two and a half hectares. He wants no more land, just as he wants no bigger cellar, more bottles or a scale of production he could no longer oversee personally. He keeps handwritten notebooks recording every harvest, temperature and experiment. They contain more than results: they trace mistakes, attempts and decisions that cannot be reproduced from a predetermined recipe.

Nor did ancestral knowledge represent a call to preserve tradition unchanged. The postcard from 1942 showed him that experience is passed on so the next generation can use it, rather than keep it under glass. Alongside his classic Pinot, Kosta therefore began exploring something most growers would remove or disregard: the small, second-crop bunches that develop on lateral shoots.

If autumn is sufficiently long, dry and sunny, these bunches at the ends of the shoots can ripen fully. They do not appear every year, and there are never many. When nature permits, Kosta makes between three hundred and five hundred bottles from them. He named the wine Pino Svetih Ratnika—Pinot of the Holy Warriors.

The name was not devised in the cellar or at a marketing agency. It was waiting in the family tree.

Kosta’s great-great-grandfather and great-grandfather, father and son, died together at Kajmakčalan during the First World War. He did not put their names on the label. He dedicated to them a wine that can be made only in rare years, and in just a few hundred bottles.

“This is my ancestors’ wine, and it must be the best thing in my cellar. If I do everything I can, and God helps with a beautiful, sunny autumn, we’ll have Pino Svetih Ratnika.”

Most growers do not regard grapes from lateral shoots as material around which to build a serious wine. They develop late, ripen slowly and depend entirely on the closing weeks of the growing season. That was precisely what attracted Kosta. He could not produce a planned quantity, nor could he hurry nature. He had to wait for healthy grapes, autumn warmth and the moment when the small bunches reached the ripeness he sought.

History in his wine names is therefore no decoration. Nor is it an attempt to invent a grand story retrospectively for each label. With Pino Svetih Ratnika, the story existed long before the wine. He simply had to find a wine worthy of carrying it.

Kosta did not look to the past solely in search of his ancestors. In Župa’s vineyards, he also sought varieties disappearing alongside the way of life in which they had once belonged. While other winemakers devoted increasing attention to Tamjanika, he turned to a variety known mainly to older growers.

They called it Ranka because it ripened early, and it was also referred to as Tamjanika Jagodarka. Kosta chose the simplest name for its wine: Jagoda—Strawberry. The grapes have a strawberry-like fragrance, so, he says, the people had already named it.

“The name has already travelled the world. Abroad, they don’t translate it as ‘strawberry’. It’s simply called Jagoda.”

The early ripening that had given it one of its old names eventually became a disadvantage. In the era of large wine companies, organised grape purchasing began in September or October, too late for a variety that needed picking earlier. It was delicious to eat, but commercially uninteresting to growers who had nobody to sell it to. Little by little, it disappeared from the vineyards.

Kosta decided to bring it back before it vanished altogether. Its rarity was not the only attraction. He was also drawn to the fact that almost nobody else saw a future in it.

He found surviving vines, took scion wood and grafted a thousand new plants. He made his first Jagoda wine in 2011, but was not entirely satisfied. The variety had to be understood afresh: the right harvest date established, its behaviour during processing understood, and a way found to preserve what made it different from every other grape.

It took him three years to make the wine he wanted.

“I didn’t want to plant something fashionable simply because everyone else was planting it. Almost all the winemakers in Župa devoted themselves to Tamjanika, which became something of a trend. I stubbornly stood behind Jagoda.”

His resistance to fashion did not mean he had anything against Tamjanika. He simply saw no reason to become another producer of the same variety while something belonging to Župa, and found almost nowhere else, was disappearing before his eyes. Planting Jagoda was therefore only part of the task. He also had to find its place in the world of wine again.

He introduced it to an audience interested in indigenous varieties that had previously been unaware it existed. At a Wine Mosaic gathering in Montreux, however, he first gave an update on his own cellar.

“My wife has told me the wines are sleeping peacefully and everything is fine at home.”

He did not mention the children. After the presentation, an American woman in the audience raised her hand.

“And are the children all right?”

That was Kosta’s first presentation of Jagoda to an international audience. A variety once disadvantaged by ripening too early had reached Switzerland because one winemaker refused to accept that its time had passed.

Jagoda was not the only old variety on which he built his answer to the question of what Župa could offer. For him, Prokupac was not a rarity that needed rescuing from extinction, but a grape without which the region could not be explained.

“Prokupac is the soul of Župa.”

From it, he made Sveti Gral—Holy Grail. The name came from his belief that in Prokupac he had recognised the kind of wine people might have drunk in Christ’s time.

At first glance, Pinot Noir, Jagoda and Prokupac had little in common. One was a world-famous variety notorious for its demands, another an almost forgotten secret of Župa, and the third the historical backbone of the entire region. Kosta approached them in the same way: he began by asking what each could offer if given enough time.

He recognised something childlike in that approach.

“You can’t achieve anything serious unless you approach the world like a child. You must remain eager to learn, curious, with a playful imagination and a restless spirit. You have to play with wine, but that play takes a great deal of work.”

His play was therefore never random experimentation. Everything he tried went into the notebooks. Childlike curiosity posed the questions; the vineyard, cellar and years supplied the answers. Sometimes only after the third harvest.

Kosta believes wine can be disturbed even when a person thinks nothing is happening in the cellar. That is why there are no loud conversations or vocal music there. The wine listens to instrumental music twenty-four hours a day, just as the vines listen to it at night in the vineyard.

“Both vines and wine are alive. When the wine falls asleep, people must fall silent.”

That quiet is part of his way of working: it gives him room to follow the wine and notice changes that might escape him in a larger cellar among pumps and people.

In such a cellar, two and a half hectares are a measure he has chosen for himself. Every additional hectare would bring more grapes, but less time for each barrel, experiment and wine. Kosta does not want a scale of production that would force him to delegate what he now does himself.

“For me, wine isn’t business. It is love and honour, and making wine is an honourable calling.”

He uses the same word, creation, when speaking about wine and painting. Yet he does not consider them a single art. For him, they are two parallel lines that never meet, although they have accompanied him throughout his life.

“Give one person a blank canvas and paints, and another land and a vine, then wait to see what they create. The painter waits for the moment to add the final dot and declare the picture finished. The winegrower follows the weather and the growing season, waiting for the moment to harvest.”

Kosta painted long before wine became his paint. Designing his own labels felt natural, because he did not want someone else interpreting through images what he had made in the vineyard and cellar. Then he found a connection quite literally inside the bottle.

He began painting with Pinot Noir.

Wine on paper behaves differently from conventional paint. It changes tone as it dries, reacts with the surface and continues evolving in the picture over time. Kosta calls these works vinorels: paintings made with wine. After other painters had turned to Plavac Mali or Blaufränkisch, he chose the variety to which he had already devoted most of his winemaking life.

The choice seemed almost predetermined.

“There’s a colour called burgundy in painting, after all.”

Pinot thus became more than a wine to pour into a glass. He could use it to paint a label, a face or a scene, allowing the variety to reveal its unpredictability on paper too. What he called a devil in the bottle became, in a painting, a colour he could never entirely control.

Kosta did not regard that unpredictability as a flaw. Had he wanted complete control, he would have chosen neither Pinot nor Jagoda nor second-crop grapes. And he would probably never have chosen wine as paint.

The devil in his story about Pinot did not remain confined to the bottle. When explaining why he refuses to make bargains in winemaking, Kosta recalls the legend of Munich’s Frauenkirche.

According to the legend, the builder struck a bargain with the devil: he would erect a church without windows. Once it was finished, the devil stood at a particular spot near the entrance, looked inside and indeed could see no windows. From his position, the columns concealed them completely. Only when he stepped forward did a light-filled space open before him. Realising he had been tricked, he stamped his foot on the floor, leaving the mark still shown to visitors as the Devil’s Footprint.

Architecture, however, is not the only thing that interests Kosta in the legend.

“I make no pacts. Neither with the devil nor with the market. The light must always win.”

For him, the market is another system of expectations trying to tell a winemaker what to plant, how much to produce, what kind of wines to make and how to present them. Kosta does not ignore it: the wine must, after all, reach someone who will drink it. He simply refuses to let the market decide for him.

“I’m not interested in a market that doesn’t deserve my wine.”

He makes too little wine to attempt to satisfy a mass market, and has consciously refused to expand the business. He does not want to sell tens of thousands of bottles or persuade as many people as possible to drink what he makes. Those who recognise in his wines the reason they came into being are enough.

At a festival, someone asked why he did not submit his wines to competitions. His answer summed up his attitude towards comparing wines through scores and medals.

“Wine is not a competition. Wine is a confession.”

Nor does he want to give drinkers a lengthy lesson before they bring the glass to their lips. The techniques, notes and years of trial remain in the cellar. In the glass, he believes, the result must speak for itself.

“If a wine needs explaining, it isn’t a good wine.”

Kosta nevertheless talks about his wines at length and with pleasure. He speaks of ancestors, varieties, lateral shoots, gravity, silence and music. But he does not offer these stories as instructions telling a taster what to experience. They explain why he made the wine, rather than why anyone should like it.

Taste, he says, eludes complete measurement anyway. An analysis can establish a wine’s chemical composition, but cannot predict whose face will break into a smile after the first sip.

“Everyone’s taste is shaped differently. In wine, people can find a smile, friendship and love, everything that makes life beautiful. Wine seeks those things, but creates them too.”

His notebooks are not collections of ready-made answers. They are a conversation he carries on with the vineyard from one harvest to the next. They preserve what he tried, where he went wrong, what nature allowed and what should be done differently next time.

“You can take everything from me, but never my notebook.”

One handwritten message from a camp helped Kosta find his own path to the vineyard. Now he too records what might one day help someone carry on without him.