Why We Pour Macedonian Wine

Count the countries on our wine list and something odd falls out. There are nineteen wines on it — ten reds, six whites, three bubblies. Five are Italian. Four are French. Two are Spanish, one is from New Zealand and one, improbably, is from Bali.

Six are from Macedonia. Which makes Macedonia the single best-represented country on the wine list of a Japanese–Middle Eastern izakaya in Jalan Besar, ahead of France and ahead of Italy. That is not an accident and it is not a joke, so here is the explanation.

The six bottles, exactly as the list prints them

Three reds and three whites. The grape line and the tasting note under each one are the menu’s own words, not ours:

• R5. POPOV VRANEC SMOLNIK (MACEDONIA) — Vranec — “Bold, inky, blackberry-rich with rustic grip and charm.”
• R6. SKOVIN CABERNET SAUVIGNON 2016 (MACEDONIA) — Cabernet Sauvignon — “Deep, smoky and balanced with black cherry depth.”
• R7. BOVIN ALEXANDAR 2017 (MACEDONIA) — Vranec, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot — “Velvety, rich and full of dark fruit energy.”
• W4. POPOV DOMAINE VRSHNIK 2018 (MACEDONIA) — Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Gewürztraminer — “Bright citrus and florals, smooth and balanced.”
• W5. CHATEAU KAMNIK TEMJANIKA 2018 (MACEDONIA) — Temjanika — “Perfumed and playful—peach, white flowers, a little flirt of spice.”
• W6. SKOVIN CHARDONNAY BARRIQUE 2012 (MACEDONIA) — Chardonnay — “Golden, creamy, rich with vanilla and ripe citrus notes.”

Half of our white wine list is Macedonian. Three of our ten reds are. And two of those three reds are made wholly or partly from a grape most people reading this will never have heard of, which is where the story actually starts.

What our list does not tell you

One honest note before anything else. Our wine list prints the country and nothing more — no region, no subzone, no importer. So everything below about where these wineries sit and when they were founded comes from the producers’ own public profiles and from Macedonian wine bodies, not from our menu. We are telling you what we know and where we got it, rather than dressing up the card.

Three names cover the six bottles, plus a fourth for the Temjanika:

• Popov — a family winery founded in 2001 at Sopot, in the Tikveš region, with roughly forty hectares of its own vineyards. Smolnik and Vrshnik are not brand names invented for export; they are the names of two of its vineyard domains, which is why both appear on our list attached to different wines.
• Bovin — the one we could confirm on the winery’s own website: founded in 1998 by the brothers Kiril and Gjorgji Bogevski, based at Negotino in the Tikveš region, and, in its own words, the first privately built winery in Macedonia.
• Skovin — founded in 1979, working the Skopje region, and by some distance the oldest cellar on our list.
• Chateau Kamnik — founded in 2004 on the hills at the edge of Skopje, a modern boutique operation and one of the first Macedonian wineries to become known internationally.

Four producers, three of them younger than most of the French chateaux on the same card. That is the shape of the industry: the country has made wine since antiquity, but privately owned, estate-bottled, export-minded Macedonian wine is essentially a phenomenon of the last twenty-five years.

Where the wine actually comes from

The centre of gravity is Tikveš, North Macedonia’s largest wine region, spread around the towns of Kavadarci and Negotino and covering something in the order of eleven thousand hectares of vineyard. It sits where a Mediterranean climate and a continental one overlap: long hot growing seasons, mountains to shelter it, and warm air moving up from the Aegean. That combination produces exactly what you would expect — ripe, dark, structured reds, and whites that need picking early to keep their acidity.

The Wine & Spirit Education Trust, writing about the country in its own knowledge centre, makes the point that matters most here: North Macedonia has the largest planted area of Vranec anywhere in the world. It is not a curiosity grape that someone in Skopje is experimenting with. It is the country’s signature, and the country is its home.

So is it actually rare?

Less rare than we would like to claim, and we would rather be accurate than dramatic. You can buy Macedonian wine in Singapore. At least two local retailers list North Macedonia as a region and stock Vranec and Temjanika; the specialist vino.sg has been writing about both grapes for years. If you want a bottle at home tonight, it is a solved problem.

What is genuinely uncommon is finding it on a restaurant list — and rarer still finding six of them, as the largest single country, on a list of nineteen. Most Singapore wine programmes are built from the same five or six countries because those are the wines guests recognise. Ours is not, and that was a decision rather than an oversight.

Why we made it

Because of the food. That is the entire answer, and it is worth spelling out.

Our kitchen cooks Middle Eastern dishes with Japanese technique over a charcoal grill. That means smoke, char, sesame and fat on one side, and lemon, yoghurt, herbs and pickles on the other. A wine list assembled to flatter that has to do two specific things. It needs reds with enough tannin and dark fruit to stand next to charred lamb and pork without being erased by it, and it needs whites aromatic enough to hold their own against garlic, mint and tahini rather than disappearing under them.

Macedonia happens to be very good at both, for reasons of climate rather than fashion. The reds are ripe and firm; the whites, particularly the aromatic ones, are perfumed in a way that stands up to a table full of mezze. Those two facts did more to build this list than any flag on the label.

There is a second reason, and it is less high-minded. A guest who has ordered Bordeaux a hundred times has never ordered a Vranec, and the moment where somebody tastes something they have no reference point for is one of the better moments in a restaurant. It is the same instinct that put kombu dashi in the babaganoush and mentaiko in the taramasalata. We are not a fine-dining room and we are not solemn about wine, but we would rather pour you something you will remember.

What to drink them with, from our own menu

Concretely, and only using dishes that exist:

• The Vranec (R5) against the Mangalica pork collar or the Margra lamb rump with its méchoui spice rub — dark fruit and grip against fat and char.
• The Bovin Alexandar (R7), softer because of the Merlot in the blend, with the Angus ribeye or the wagyu karubi.
• The Temjanika (W5) with the whole mezze section, and specifically with the labne and the hummus. Aromatic white, garlicky food. It is the most reliable pairing on our list.
• The Domaine Vrshnik (W4), with Gewürztraminer in the blend, alongside the Atlantic seabass or the charcoal chicken with its garlic-yuzu toum.
• The Skovin Chardonnay Barrique (W6) where you would normally reach for a white Burgundy — the burrata, the wood-smoked salmon salata.

And if none of that appeals, the list still has its Amarone, its Bordeaux and its Cahors Malbec. Nobody is required to be adventurous to eat here.

Practical notes

We cannot quote you a price for any of these. Our wine list prints no prices at all — there is not a single figure on it other than the bottle numbers and the vintages. Ask at the table. For the general shape of an evening, what dinner here costs is the honest version.

Two of these six bottles get their own pieces, because they deserve them: Vranec, the grape that loves charcoal smoke, and Temjanika and the perfumed whites of Macedonia. If you would rather drink Japanese tonight, our five sakes are on the same card, on the other side — and if it is the cocktail half you came for, what a shochu highball actually is is the honest place to start, including the part where we admit we do not pour one.

Dietary: this is a wine list, and our kitchen serves pork, so Habibi-san is not halal. The rest is in our FAQ.

The list itself lives on our wines page, the food it was built for is on our menu, and the room is in the gallery. If the wider evening is what you are planning, start with our izakaya guide, then book a table at 29 Hamilton Road.