Fakin Winery

Hand-picked fruit below Motovun

Hand-picking comes first for Marko Fakin, winemaker at Fakin Winery in Motovun, Croatia, before the cellar decides what modern tools can usefully add. He has held the winemaker role here since 2010, working in Bataji, the hamlet of Brkač below the medieval hilltop town, where the family vineyards sit close enough to make the vineyard and cellar feel like one decision rather than two. His own rule is plain: old traditional methods in the picking, present-day technology only where it makes sense. That restraint gives the house its line. Fakin works as owner and winemaker, with the cellar’s attention kept near Teran and Malvazija Istarska, the two Istrian varieties that carry much of the estate’s identity. The public story around him includes the practical credential of a graduate oenologist and the local fact of having been born and raised among the vineyards around Motovun. More important at the bench-side is the continuity of the station. Since 2010, the same maker has been reading the same hill, making choices vintage by vintage rather than chasing a different voice each season.

Three ranges from one hill

The program at Fakin Winery is built around estate vineyards around Motovun, with 30 hectares giving the cellar its field of work. The house organizes that fruit into FAKIN CLASSICS, FAKIN SINGLE VINEYARD, and FAKIN LIMITED EDITION, a structure that lets the same landscape move from direct village expression to named, more selective bottlings. Teran appears in more than one register, including Teran Il Primo and Teran Michel; Malvazija has its own place through Malvasia La Prima. Fakin B&M and Chamal sparkling wine widen the vocabulary without pulling the cellar away from Istria. The method is not presented as a rejection of technology. Marko Fakin uses it with a narrow brief, after manual vineyard work has already set the terms. In that sense the craft is disciplined rather than nostalgic. The hands gather the fruit; the cellar protects line, detail, and restraint.

The tasting room at the foot of the town

The room sits in countryside rather than on a street, with vineyards around it and Motovun above. It has the feel of a family winery that has learned to receive people without turning the work into theatre: bright space, conversational noise, glasses on the counter, the hill visible as part of the tasting rather than a backdrop added later. The atmosphere is warm in the Istrian way, rustic at the edges, contemporary in its focus on the wines. Gastronomic dinners and vineyard experiences extend the cellar outward, but the center remains the same sequence of fruit, decision, glass. In a small place, that sequence is easy to see.

Teran carried into wider view

Recognition has followed the wines without changing the scale of the house. Marko Fakin is cited as the only Croatian winemaker to have won Decanter gold medals for seven consecutive years, and Teran reached 95 points on the American market in 2023. Awards can flatten a cellar if they become the point. Here they read better as evidence of repetition: the same hill, the same varieties, the same controlled use of the long way. The bottle that made that argument travel furthest is Teran.