DRAŽEN ĐURĐIĆ: He Knew When to Leave Each Chair

At half past midnight, Metropolitan Amfilohije was still examining Dražen Đurđić in Introduction to Theology.

That morning, Dražen had worked at his construction company in Novi Sad, finished the most important tasks by eleven, got into his car and driven five and a half hours towards Sarajevo. There, he waited his turn. His professors included bishops whose schedules did not revolve around university examination dates, so an exam might take place in the afternoon, in the evening or, as on this occasion, well after midnight.

He was the last student Metropolitan Amfilohije examined before he stopped teaching.

Dražen passed, stepped out into the night and immediately set off home. His company would be waiting for him again in the morning.

Such a schedule would have been demanding enough for someone studying theology while running a construction business. Dražen Đurđić completed part of his studies while also playing his final handball season for Proleter in Zrenjanin. Before that, he had played for Metaloplastika, Sloga Doboj and a succession of other clubs, spending fifteen seasons as a professional and making several dozen appearances for Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Despite all that, he did not describe himself as an athlete.

“I’m a textbook example of a non-athlete in sport!”

He meant the kind of player who arrives a few minutes before a six o’clock training session, just in time to pull on his socks and trainers and run into the hall. While others turned up half an hour early and were already sweating when training began, Dražen merely made sure he was not late.

Yet he lasted fifteen years.

He remembers the day he decided to stop playing as one of the happiest of his life.

“No more running at seven in the morning, early starts or smelly sports halls. I was overjoyed because I knew a new life lay ahead.”

He could not then have known how many more lives there would be.

Handball first took him from his native Sarajevo to Šabac. He read in Sportski žurnal that Veselin Vujović was returning to Metaloplastika as coach, and a few days later received an invitation to join him. In Sarajevo, he had played in the backcourt, but Vujović took one look at his limited jumping ability and physical attributes and moved him to pivot in 1996.

At a time when pivots were expected to be short, powerful and stocky, Dražen was tall and thin.

“I think I was one of the first pivots like that. Vujović was simply a visionary.”

He was not a regular starter at Metaloplastika, but found another role.

“Vujović liked me. I was something of a mascot. Before he entered the changing room, I’d imitate his motivational speeches. He’d laugh himself silly.”

Handball was not his whole world, but he learned to accept the role he was given. In Sarajevo, he was a backcourt player; in Šabac, a pivot; in Vujović’s changing room, a mascot.

After Metaloplastika, he played for Sloga Doboj and several other clubs. The contrast between sport in the former Yugoslavia and Germany left a particular impression. There, a teammate would arrive at second-division training straight from work.

“I asked what he did, and he said, ‘I drive a lorry.’ He played for enjoyment. With us, as soon as you show talent, they pile expectations onto you.”

Dražen believed that sports producing national-team success could just as easily produce people unprepared for life after their final match.

“Our sporting system leaves people needing social assistance. Especially handball, water polo and volleyball-sports that don’t pay well but are always expected to deliver trophies.”

Leaving handball was therefore a relief rather than a dramatic fall. He did not try to stay on the sidelines, become a coach or live by retelling old matches. Once he decided it was over, he left.

He already had another direction. Before theology, he had studied economics and management, enrolling in theology at the University of Sarajevo towards the end of his playing career.

“Theology came out of a spiritual transformation. I began searching for God in the monasteries of Fruška Gora. Studying theology is really a search for God.”

He worked towards his degree over several years, alongside his final season at Proleter and the development of his construction company in Novi Sad. With a friend, he invested his handball earnings in a gravel depot on the Novi Sad Canal. Trading gravel and sand soon expanded into excavation, earthworks and engineering in construction and energy.

His studies also opened doors within the Church. He was elected to several church committees, and his company restored centuries-old churches in Srem villages, some already close to ruin. At the business’s peak, he was responsible for the wages of around fifty employees.

During those years, his father took him to two hectares of land above Sremski Karlovci and asked:

“What shall we plant here? Apricots? Pears? Apples?”

The answer was so obvious that they found it only after considering several alternatives.

“Eventually, you just slap your forehead. In Sremski Karlovci, nothing makes sense except a vineyard.”

They planted their first two hectares in 2003. They knew almost nothing about winegrowing beyond what they had learned from drinking wine, but Dražen would later suggest that the absence of a family winemaking tradition might have helped.

“Tradition can become a burden you have to carry.”

They had no equipment, old barrels or family recipe beyond questioning. They bought the best available at the time, although Serbia’s range of winemaking equipment was limited and only a handful of oenologists worked in private wineries.

They made their first white wines in 2003, but did not release them. Their first commercial wine was a Sauvignon Blanc from 2005, followed a year later by their first Cabernet Franc harvest. Dražen practically discounts that vintage, regarding 2007 as the serious beginning, when the variety that would become their signature first revealed its potential. They imported clones from Germany’s Rauscher at a time when almost nobody in Serbia considered Cabernet Franc a wine in its own right.

Initially, the Đurđić family softened it with ten or fifteen per cent Merlot, but Dražen later increasingly insisted on a varietal wine.

He did not want to make another robust red blend in a country already well supplied with them. He wanted a grape that ripened early on Fruška Gora, retained acidity and did not feel heavy despite alcohol levels regularly exceeding fourteen per cent.

“I can drink Cabernet Franc in the evening while reading a book or watching television. By the third glass, Cabernet Sauvignon weighs me down.”

For years, however, the vineyard remained Dražen’s sideline. Construction brought in money, winemaking consumed it, and between them stood his church commitments. When his father stepped back, Dražen inherited what he called a hot potato: a vineyard, a small wine operation and a decision he could no longer postpone indefinitely.

His friend and business partner warned him several times:

“Are you in construction, winemaking or the diocese? You’re going to lose your way!”

Dražen knew the answer, but needed several years to accept it.

“You can’t sit on two chairs.”

He decided to leave construction.

It was a difficult decision because of the work and the fifty or so people for whom he had felt responsible for years, but he felt no nostalgia for the business itself.

“Construction eats people alive. I don’t know a single builder who stayed in the business until normal retirement age. Either their heart gave out or they ended up disabled.”

Just as he had not tried to return to the sports hall after his last handball match, he did not look back at the machinery, gravel and building sites. Around 2012, he began devoting himself seriously to the winery. Only then did he realise how much time he had lost treating the vineyard as recreation between two more important jobs.

“When the new wineries appeared, I realised I’d lost at least five years playing at another business while making wine on the side. Like in The Alchemist: look around and you’ll see it was all right under your nose.”

What lay under his nose proved more valuable than he and his father could have imagined when choosing between apples, pears and vines.

Only around ten years after buying the land did Dražen discover that Zaharije Orfelin had listed their slope among the finest vineyard sites on the Danube side of Fruška Gora. At different times, the land had been used by a cooperative and the Karlovci Institute of Viticulture and Oenology. It was also here that Professor Petar Cindrić selected the original material for SK 54, the most widely planted Grašac clone.

Without knowing it, the Đurđić family had planted a vineyard where, decades earlier, viticultural science had been selecting the future of a variety.

Dražen did not declare this gently sloping site above the Danube, with its slower ripening and currents of Carpathian winds, a grand cru. He saw no need for borrowed classifications.

“If we ever classify Fruška Gora’s vineyard sites, this one certainly won’t be called grand cru, but it will be in the first category.”

They bought some grapes from long-standing partner growers in the same small area. Dražen saw no betrayal of terroir or the family concept in that.

“We’re not the best winegrowers in the world. Our neighbours know how to do the job too, and often do it better than we do. Why not make use of that?”

Cabernet Franc remained the winery’s calling card. They had started working with it in Serbia before the variety became attractive to other winemakers, convinced that it felt more at home on Pannonian sites than in some regions the world considered its traditional addresses.

Cabernet Franc gave the Đurđić winery recognition, but for foreign markets Dražen increasingly sought wines that could not have come from just anywhere.

Probus offered precisely that. The newly developed variety combines Cabernet Sauvignon with Kadarka, which Dražen considers Serbia’s most important historical grape.

“I don’t want to claim Probus is the best simply because we planted it, but on Fruška Gora the grapes are fantastic. It’s at home here.”

In the vineyard, it is vigorous, thin-skinned and susceptible to disease, but its rarity became an advantage in China. While other Đurđić wines sold there for twenty or thirty dollars, Dražen said Probus fetched 250 dollars a bottle.

“People say today that wine needs a story. Probus has one.”

Neoplanta entered the cellar by chance. They bought a small quantity of grapes from the Karlovci Institute and obtained a fresh, aromatic wine with moderate acidity and low alcohol. A crossing of Traminer and Smederevka, it retained aromatic appeal without the heavy perfume Traminer can develop when picked too late.

When interest in Grašac revived, they replanted a hectare of the variety whose most widespread clone had been selected on that very site decades earlier. The first grapes were destined for sparkling wine. In June 2026, their traditional-method Grašac Beli Brut 2021 scored 93 points at GROW du Monde in Mikulov and was named the best Grašac sparkling wine.

The Đurđić winery’s best-selling wine was never intended for sale. In 2006, Dražen made between 150 and 200 litres of sweet wine for three churches in Sremski Karlovci, where the cheapest available wine had often been used. The family donated it to the Church. Bishop Vasilije blessed the wine and suggested they make more. Production gradually approached twenty thousand bottles, and the wine reached around ten dioceses of the Serbian Orthodox Church and three of the Romanian Orthodox Church.

From theology studies and the restoration of old churches, Dražen had thus returned to the Church in a way he could not have foreseen: through the cellar.

The liturgical wine is based on Merlot, with at least thirty per cent Cabernet Franc, and roughly a third matures in barrel. They stop fermentation in part of the wine and use added grape must to retain sweetness and balance, without fortification.

“Others make liturgical wines too, but ours is the most sought-after. I think that’s where the secret of its quality lies.”

It was not the only wine in which Sremski Karlovci’s history found new packaging. The Bermet Crni Vitez-Black Knight-drew on an old local tradition, but Dražen had little faith in the mystique of secret family recipes.

“Two or three winemakers know the recipe. The key is the base wine, not a secret list of herbs.”

Crni Vitez is made from Merlot and Cabernet Franc. Merlot gives it the body to carry the aromas of twenty-seven herbs and spices, and the Đurđić family do not submit a Bermet to competitions until it has aged for at least two or three years. Crni Vitez won gold in Italy and silver at the Balkans International Wine Competition.

Mlada Simonida-Young Simonida-a Cabernet Sauvignon rosé, came about quite differently. Since the variety ripens late on Fruška Gora and struggles to reach full phenolic maturity, the family did not insist on making a powerful red from it. Instead, they harvested while the grapes retained the freshness they needed.

“There’s no special skill of ours involved. We simply chose the right type of wine for the variety.”

It was named after the Byzantine princess Simonida, who was married as a young girl to the Serbian king Milutin and became, in the label’s story, a symbol of youth, innocence and beauty.

Despite churches, historic vineyard sites, knights and princesses in their stories, the Đurđić labels did not look like museum pieces. That was precisely what Dražen wanted.

“Deep down, I’m a modern sort of person. We make wines for young people, and the visual identity has to reflect that.”

As early as 2007, Đurđić labels stood apart from Serbian attempts to imitate French châteaux, prompting complaints from some that they did not look like wine labels at all. Around 2015, they engaged Peter Gregson Studio, under Jovan Trkulja’s creative direction, and embraced clean, minimalist, large-format designs.

The labels won design awards, and other Serbian wineries later followed a similar path. Dražen did not want wines from historic land to look like museum exhibits.

He thought similarly about wine tourism. An old cellar, a few wooden benches and a story about a grandfather’s barrel were not enough.

“You can’t just clean out your grandfather’s cellar and receive tourists with average wines and poor service. Some haven’t even cleaned the cellar, because they claim cobwebs are good.”

The Đurđić winery created a tasting room, but no conventional restaurant. Dražen did not want a kitchen to take over the business for which the vineyards and cellar had been established. Cellar-door sales accounted for no more than twenty to thirty per cent, while forty to fifty per cent of production was exported, chiefly to China, but also to the United States, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Scandinavia.

He did not want to depend solely on tourists, restaurants or exports. Around thirty per cent of the grapes still came from trusted growers nearby.

The same caution guided the winery’s growth. Having reached 11.5 hectares, they announced another three or four, while a new cellar would provide room for considerably greater production. Expansion was planned over four or five years, without losing control of quality.

Dražen had learned his limits in a much harsher business.

“Construction eats people alive.”

He did not want the winery to begin doing the same.

Yet life offered him another job difficult to perform on the side. In 2024, he was elected president of the municipality of Sremski Karlovci. The man whose friend had once urged him to choose between construction, wine and the diocese found himself sitting on two chairs again: at the winery and at the head of a town with almost thirty wine producers.

This time, the roles were not entirely separate. As a winemaker, he argued that Karlovci could not live on inheritance alone; as municipal president, he repeated the same thought:

“What our ancestors left us through culture and heritage is one thing. What we do ourselves is another.”

Dražen was no longer thinking only about his own cellar. As municipal president, he spoke about a landing stage intended to bring the first river cruise ships to Karlovci, the high-speed railway putting Belgrade around thirty minutes away, and hotels that could encourage day-trippers to stay. Once, he had restored individual old churches; now, he was helping renew the place around them.

For his four children, he wanted to leave something more tangible than stories of the clubs he had played for, construction sites he had managed and offices he had held. The vineyard offered precisely that: a possibility of having somewhere to come one day, should they wish.

He did not envisage the winery’s future as a repetition of what he had already done. Cabernet Franc would remain its signature, but he was also considering a Bordeaux-style blend in which Probus would provide a local identity and take it beyond a competent imitation of Bordeaux.

After ten years, they began making Merlot again, while moving the Grašac harvest earlier to preserve freshness. Probus and Traminer continued to cause the greatest headaches, while Cabernet Franc remained the most reliable.

“Every new vintage is our best because we’re constantly learning and acquiring new knowledge.”

This was no polite winemaker’s formula for avoiding the choice of a favourite. Dražen readily singled out Sauvignon Blanc 2015 and Merlot 2009, just as he remembered the important vintages of 2007, 2012 and 2019. Yet he refused to accept that his best work was behind him.

Throughout his life, Dražen Đurđić maintained that a person could not sit on two chairs. His own life suggests he occasionally occupied three. The difference was that he knew when to get up.

“You need courage to leave the field while you still have strength. But it takes even more courage to admit to yourself that it’s time for a new life. Sport didn’t define me. The moment I said ‘enough’ did.”

At half past midnight, after his examination with Metropolitan Amfilohije, he got into his car and set off towards Novi Sad. Ahead lay five and a half hours of driving, a morning at the construction company and several lives he did not yet know he would live.

Today, when he looks through the winery window, he knows he left each of those chairs at the right time.