Summary
Gospodarski list has been advising Croatian farmers since 1842, and its register is practical rather than sceptical. It starts with a history lesson: the old hybrids — the direktori and tudumi planted after phylloxera — gradually fell out of use as their wines earned a poor reputation and effective fungicides made them redundant, nudging growers back toward varieties like Graševina and Plavac Mali. Today’s PIWI varieties, the authors argue, share nothing with those discredited plants beyond the basic fact of crossing Vitis vinifera with other species.
By 2013 Croatia already had seven PIWI varieties on its National List — Phoenix, Staufer, Sirious, Orion, Merzling, Cabernet Cortis, and Regent — starting with the Central Hilly Croatia region, and around twenty more are still under evaluation. The 2018 EU decision to open geographically protected wine categories to PIWI is the article’s central exhibit, presented as both scientific vindication and good timing: the European Green Deal’s 2030 pesticide-reduction targets mean the regulatory wind is now blowing the same way. Field trials, partly funded through the Rural Development Programme, supply the local numbers.
What the article does not discuss is equally telling: there is no mention of how growers obtain planting material, how long registration takes, or whether buyers have shown any appetite for the wines. Gospodarski list is not an academic journal, but readers should know this is advocacy, written by researchers with a stake in the outcome.
Our take
This is a farm extension pamphlet with academic credentials — and there is nothing wrong with that, except that the credentials are doing a lot of work to make the advocacy invisible. The article tells growers that the science is settled and the varieties are ready; it says nothing about whether planting material is easy to source, how long rollout might take, or what switching away from Graševina would cost. The technical content is sound. The disclosure about who is running the research sits in the byline rather than in the argument, which amounts to the same invisibility.
About the author
Both are full professors at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Agriculture. Jasminka Karoglan Kontić leads the Horticulture graduate programme and specialises in viticulture; Ana Jeromel specialises in enology and wine microbiology and has represented Croatia at the OIV Commission on Microbiology and Enology since 2010. The same Faculty of Agriculture runs the EIP operational group whose research this article promotes — a connection that is visible in the byline but never mentioned in the text itself.
About the publisher
Gospodarski list — Agricultural Gazette — has been published continuously since 1842, making it one of Europe’s oldest surviving agricultural periodicals; it comes out fortnightly, reaches around 30,000 readers, and is aimed squarely at working farmers and rural professionals rather than researchers or policymakers. It is in the business of helping growers make decisions, not questioning who supplies the information. That is a reasonable editorial position — it just means readers have to supply the critical distance themselves.