July 5, 2016
Tuesday 5 July. Day 19: Tikveš winery
If you are ever in Macedonia and want to tour the largest and most famous winery – Tikveš – make sure you ring ahead to book and take a passport to get past security. Oops.
We turned up at the gate in our taxi—the winery was 17km away back in Kavardartsi which we had passed through the day before—not having booked and without our passports. We turned on the charm, claimed as Australians we didn’t realise the system, and told them how much we had been looking forward to a tour and the restaurant for lunch. It worked.
"A grape of mysterious origins, has an emphasized muscat and splendorous scent that leaves no one indifferent. The name itself, incense, means strong, intense smell of thyme. Temjanika wine simply paints your day with the joyful colours of flowers and fruits."
I was not indifferent. My day was painted. Very fine wine.
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Soon one of the senior workers, with excellent English, was at the security gate to escort us around the winery and take us to the restaurant afterwards. The tour was short but interesting, and the lunch was really very very good. It was a wine tasting over a 3 course lunch. The wines were good and the food, especially the pork, excellently prepared. The people at the winery were very helpful and friendly. Being in the restaurant in the old brick cellars was marvellously cool, the sun was still stunningly hot.
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We walked slowly through about 2km of Kavardartsi trying to sober up a bit. It was pretty quiet. Although many shops were open, they tended not to have lights on. I was not sure if this was to save on electricity or simply an attempt to remain cooler? Apart from the many bars we had noticed the days before, it was easier to see walking how many of the shops also offered a chance to gamble.
We had a long lazy afternoon of Balkan music videos. Even with only a rudimentary capacity to tell some of the languages apart, the tropes of the videos from particular countries meant that we usually had no difficulty identifying the origin of the song before it appeared on the bottom of the screen. There is so much female nudity, sex and male chauvinism in videos from a couple of Balkan countries in particular. Especially if the video has a rap flavour…
In the early evening we walked up into town, along with other promenading people and past the families hanging out in parks.
At the Sofra Restaurant we had excellent sausage and Kababci. Finally getting to the point where we could recognise many dishes on the menu written in Cyrillic and get our order across to non-English speaking waiters! (Like in Italy, more often the wait staff are male.) We had Cnra Alva for dessert – think sugar, flour, cocoa, oil, butter and walnuts, cooked up and then pressed into a loaf tin to cool before slicing. The consistency of a wetter sesame halva… With the lemon juice – AWESOME.
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