OPG MIHELIĆ - Ghira winery

Description

The beginning of OPG Mihelić dates back to 1997, when Bruno Mihelić opened a d.o.o., and in 2003 he founded a family farm (OPG) and left the basement in Novigrad where he was also the director. It is interesting how Bruno and his wife Maria built all these vineyards, which today have 3.5 hectares, 4 hectares have olive trees and 3 hectares are fruit trees, and in the beginning they did everything by themselves because one son was studying and the other was staying in Italy. Today, in the whole story, the younger son, Damir and his mother Marija, and the older son Igor and his family help whenever their duties allow them to do so.

Today, they have Istrian malvasia, Momjansk muscat and Teran. Over time, the Mihelić family began to look at the vine with different eyes, they learned how the plant breathes, how the weather and adversity affect the plant, how the plant can give more if you treat it better - just like people. In 2017, they started to grow native grasses, use nettles, and have bees. Amphoras appeared, biodynamics is experimented with, they create their own yeast from the vineyard and enology is used minimally, propolis and algae are introduced into the treatment of the vineyard..., before they were experiments, today it is a reality in which OPG Mihelić sees the direction in which it will develop in the future their winery!

The winery currently has 6 amphoras. In these containers is Malvasia from 2021 (already the fifth vintage in a row) "which was made exclusively in the vineyard, treated with minimal doses of copper and sulfur, nettle, propolis, algae, etc... a lot of manual work, the soil is cultivated only on the surface in the dry period, sulfites are added to the wine in minimal doses and are gradually reduced, the fermentation is not controlled, the wines are not filtered and not stabilized. Today, OPG wines under the GHIRA brand with an ecological certificate are sold mainly in northwestern Istria, but they can also be found in restaurants in Italy, Slovenia, Austria, Germany and France.