Negotin and Its Stone Wine Cellars, the Serbian Wine Nobody Has Discovered Yet

There is a corner of Serbia where stone houses are not for living in: they are for storing wine. In the hinterland of Negotin, a small town of twelve thousand inhabitants in the far east of the country, the villages of Rajac and Rogljevo guard a winemaking heritage without parallel in the Balkans: about 400 historic cellars — the pivnice — built between the 18th and 19th centuries with worked stone, oak timber beams and beaten-earth floors, where oak barrels age in darkness at a constant temperature.

The pivnice of Rajac and Rogljevo

The cellars of Rajac — about 250 buildings arranged along the flanks of a hill like a small medieval village — were built starting in the 18th century by farming families who needed a cool, stable place to age the wine produced from the surrounding vineyards. Each cellar was owned by a different family, identified by symbols carved on the door: a marking system that predated any modern label. Today many are still active and offer tastings directly with the producer, often seated on wooden benches inside the cellar itself, for three to five euros per glass.

The Dionysus of Gamzigrad and the Roman tradition

This area's winemaking vocation is not medieval: it is Roman. A few kilometres from Zaječar, the site of Gamzigrad — Felix Romuliana, city of Emperor Galerius, a UNESCO World Heritage Site — yielded a colossal mosaic of the god Dionysus testifying that vines were cultivated in this valley as early as the 3rd century AD. The indigenous grape varieties skadarka and tamjanika (a naturally aromatic white) remain the most widespread in the Negotin Region today.

How to plan your visit

Negotin is about 250 kilometres from Belgrade, reachable by bus in three and a half hours for about 1,200 dinars (around ten euros). The villages of Rajac and Rogljevo are reached by car or taxi: there is no direct public transport. The best season is September and October, during the grape harvest, when the cellars open their doors and the harvest festival turns the villages into a permanent celebration. In summer the heat on the Danubian plain can be intense; spring is cool and the vineyards are in bloom.