Yesterday Borislav and I visited the St. Martin’s fair of Zagreb County wine producers. We stumbled upon some great wines and were astonished to see how high is the level of sauvignong blancs achieved by the small wineries in the region. Take only Puhelek-Purek from Zelina and Srbanovic from Voloder. Upright, steely, grassy, not seductive, just convincing. Great wines. However, a discussion on one stand made it clear that wine making philosophy coming from the Zagreb University Enological School is just weird. They seem to believe that only a commission can establish quality of a given vine and that they , i.e. the enologists, are uniquely qualified to assess the wine quality. It is so awkward because the knowledge of making wine should not really be essential for being able to enjoy wine and be knowledgable about its consumption. The enologists clearly do not taste and discuss wines of the world during their studies enough to give them broad and deep insight and to more soffisticated consumers they appear of unsufficient understanding of the typologies and charactereistics of the wines outside of their immediate regions of production and knowledge. Such situation, regretfully, is abundantly clear and almost symptomatic for modern production patterns and the wines present on the market. Many products today are offered by the people who know how to make them but the idea of enjoying them is secondary during the production.