If Hobbiton had a love child with the Loire Valley, the offspring would be Zmajevac, a tiny winemaking community in Slavonia, a rural Croatian region famous for its adorable gabled wine cellars (known as “gators”) which burrow their rear ends into the hill so the bottles can chill in cool mud.
Wandering through the village, exploring both of Zmajevac’s two rival “wine streets” – one traditionally Catholic, one Protestant – I realised I had never seen such a concentration of cellars in my life.
