All vineyards must have resolved property rights issues and be registered as vineyards, which is mostly not the case. Of the total 33 thousand hectares of vineyard areas, domestic vintners could lose at least half upon Croatia’s entry into the EU.
According to the Regulation on Viticulture and Winemaking, all vineyards in Croatia must have resolved property rights issues and be registered as vineyards.
This means that the EU will not recognize a vineyard that is listed in the cadastre as, for example, a pasture, and wine producers will face significant difficulties in explaining the amount of wine produced in disproportion to the recognized areas. For instance, the company Feravino from Feričanci, owned by the Nexe group, has 150 hectares of vineyards, but only 50 hectares are registered as a vineyard. – We have a part that was once recorded as a forest, and now it has vineyards. We have already done a lot in accordance with the Regulation, but we still have a huge job ahead of us – says Dražen Horvatek from the Property Law Service at Nexe group.
Other companies in Croatia are in the same situation, as well as small grape producers, especially those who have relatively recently started this business and have purchased land but have not yet registered it as a vineyard. However, as stated in the Ministry of Agriculture, ‘ownership is inalienable, but it also obliges’, which means they must submit the application themselves and not wait for the state to do it for them. To do this, it is necessary to initiate the procedure for changing the agricultural crop at the local cadastre office, which until recently took about six months to resolve, but recently this procedure has been expedited. Indeed, companies and more serious producers are aware of this, but it seems there is a real danger that they will not manage to resolve the issue of all areas. – It will be difficult, but I am almost certain that we will manage to resolve this problem in Feravino before entering the EU – Horvatek said optimistically. However, considering that land registries in Croatia have not been resolved since the time of Franz Joseph, such outdatedness could come to a reckoning at the moment we enter the European Union. (E. F.)
