Small, spherical, blue-black; thick skin — the 'small blue' of the name
The son of Zinfandel — and the clue that solved the case. When researchers from UC Davis hunted Zinfandel's European origins through Croatia in the 1990s, Plavac Mali kept matching halfway: close, never identical. The reason emerged with the DNA work — it is the offspring of Tribidrag, alias Crljenak Kaštelanski, Zinfandel itself, and the rare Dobričić of Šolta island: Dalmatia's own child of a grape the coast had almost forgotten.
Its name means "small blue one", for the tight dark berries. On the baking seaward slopes of Dingač and Postup, on the Pelješac peninsula, where the vines take the sun direct, reflected off the sea and bounced back from white stone, it makes dark, figgy, powerful reds — Dalmatia's flagship.
In the blend
Share of this grape in a typical blend of each wine