Wine and Olive Oil Country: A Taste of the Bar Region

Bar's reputation is mostly about the coast, but the hills just inland, toward Virpazar and Lake Skadar, hold a genuinely different side of the region, one built around wine and olives rather than beaches and old town walls.

The Crmnica wine region

The hills west of Lake Skadar form the Crmnica wine region, one of Montenegro's oldest winemaking areas, with Virpazar sitting roughly at its center. This is widely considered the traditional home of Vranac, Montenegro's signature red grape, and the region is often described as its "cradle." The area's limestone soils and the lake's own microclimate, which moderates extreme temperatures and extends the growing season, are part of what makes this particular stretch of hillside so suited to the grape.

Vranac produces a bold, deeply colored, tannic red, and it's the wine most closely associated with Montenegro generally. Tasting it in the region it actually comes from, rather than a bottle picked up elsewhere, is a different experience, and the small, family-run wineries scattered through the Crmnica hills are part of what gives the area its character. We're intentionally not naming specific producers here, the region has many small operations and it's worth asking locally or checking current listings rather than relying on any single recommendation.

Getting there

Virpazar sits within Opština Bar municipality, which means a taxi from Bar can pick you up directly and take you into the hills without needing to cross out of the pickup zone. It's a genuinely scenic drive on its own, climbing up from the coast into a completely different landscape within a fairly short distance. Our local guide to Bar municipality covers Virpazar and the wider Lake Skadar area in more depth, including what else is worth seeing around the lake itself.

A day built around wine, not just a stop

If wine tasting is the main point of your trip rather than a quick add-on, it's worth treating it the way you would any slower, unhurried day, planning for stops that take longer than expected, and not rushing between them. Our guide to hiring a taxi for a custom day covers exactly this kind of trip, and applies just as well to a wine country day as it does to a photography-focused one.

Pairing it with the old olive tree

Bar's own old olive tree, a genuinely ancient tree just outside town, estimated at over two thousand years old, sits alongside the region's other agricultural claim to fame. Olive groves are a defining part of the landscape all through this area, not just around the old tree itself, and pairing a wine country trip inland with a stop at the olive tree closer to town makes for a fuller sense of what the Bar region actually produces, wine from the hills, olives and olive oil from the groves nearer the coast. Our local guide covers the old olive tree in full.

A good rainy-day alternative too

Because tastings and cellar visits are largely an indoor activity, a wine country trip holds up well even if the weather doesn't cooperate, unlike a beach day. See our guide to a rainy day in Bar for more on that kind of flexible planning.

If you're also hiking Mount Rumija

Rumija rises just south of this same general area, overlooking both Bar and Lake Skadar's basin from above. If you're combining a wine country visit with an interest in the region's landscape more broadly, our guide to hiking Mount Rumija is worth a look too, though it's a genuinely separate trip rather than something to combine into a single day.

The wider picture

For how this kind of inland, slower-paced trip compares to a more typical coastal day trip, see our distance and time guide, and for the full comparison of your transport options generally, our main guide.

Booking

You can book a trip out to Virpazar and the Crmnica hills through the Greencar.me Taxi app on Android or the App Store on iPhone, as long as your pickup point is inside Bar municipality.