Objectively: 30 years, and then some, have passed since Zvonimir Tomac was winning brilliant medals in France and, in the best possible way, introduced Plesivica to the world. Subjectively: nearly 40 years have gone by since the Old Man and I began making wines on his advice. My Old Man was a construction designer, he drew up or adapted thousands of houses to new needs, and the work he did for Zvonimir Tomac was also our family’s entry into the serious world of wine. 
Dad suggested we make a sparkling wine from wine matured in amphora. I was against it. I was afraid the tannins from the amphora wouldn’t sit well with the carbon dioxide, Tomislav Tomac candidly handed his father Zvonimir the credit for a wine they were the first in the world to make: a sparkling wine from wine aged in amphora. The vintage was 2010, and six years later the wine delighted even the critics of the British magazine Decanter. They named it among the 75 most significant wines in the world in 2016, and only six of those were sparkling. The Plesivica sparkler joined the company of two Champagnes and three “home” wines, that is, British sparkling wines. 
That surprised the Tomacs too, they didn’t even know they were in the running. Someone from the Decanter team had tasted the wine at the estate and obtained it through private channels. Zvonimir Tomac’s decision had been to let a long-macerated wine undergo a second fermentation. And they weren’t the only ones for long. They carried that sparkling wine to Champagne and presented it at the small but famous house of Selosse. After tasting it, Anselme Selosse bought two clay vessels and in them aged the base wine for his Champagne of the 2015 vintage. 
In December of that same 2015, Zvonimir Tomac hosted a gathering to mark the 25th anniversary of bottling the first sparkling wine of the family winery from Donja Reka near Jastrebarsko. At the time they still had one more bottle of that sparkler from 1990. For showing only, of course, not for tasting. After all, in total they had filled just 12. Sparkling wines are our main business, everything else is play, Zvonko said then. He passed away on Sunday, 5 February 2023. On Saturday evening he was still among friends. See you tomorrow, he said as they parted, thinking of the traditional card game he never made it to. 
During the covid years the Tomacs built a new cellar in order to separate primary processing from wine ageing, and still wines from sparkling. The family has long worked with wine and grapes, as many do on Plesivica, but Zvonimir was among the first to start bottling wine, back in 1987. It was a red Veltlinac. With Rajnski Rizling (Rhine Riesling) he won medals from 1991 at the then exceptionally strong judging in Ljubljana, and with a 1992 late harvest even gold; in France his 1996 Chardonnay and 1997 sparkling wine took awards. 
He always said he had learned a great deal from Franjo Jambrovic, an oenologist originally from Medimurje, and from his neighbour and fellow winemaker Vladimir Braco Nezic. From the latter he even bought a vineyard of the old Zelenac variety, known in Austria as Rotgipfler, from which Vlado Krauthaker makes lovely wines here. From the 2016 vintage Zvonimir Tomac made Zelenac as a single-varietal wine and wrote on the label: The wine of my professors Jambrovic and Nezic. 
In memory of a great winemaker and a great man, Zvonimir Tomac. He often visited Samobor and would come for a glass of wine at Tin on King Tomislav Square.
08.08.2025.
