Villa Lipica was built as a cellar with a vineyard on the northern slopes of Bilogora, on the highest peak in this region, Lipica, back in 1985. Even then, there was a vision of turning the cellar into a tourist facility, so the house was divided into two parts in its original version – the ground floor and attic and basement. In the basement, a part is planned where there will be a wine cellar and a wine tasting room, and the upper part, which includes the ground floor and attic, as a part where a vacation house will be created. A vineyard with approximately 1,000 vines of the Graševina variety is planted next to the building.
But, as it happens, one event in our family turned the whole situation around and put the plans for the development and completion of this winery completely aside. After that, the entire building served as a space for small family get-togethers and wine production for own needs. As our whole family loved to engage in activities in nature, where from the beginning we were members of the recreation society Zeleno srce, Pitomača, with which we visited many destinations in the Republic of Croatia and Hungary by bicycle, on these trips we became familiar with the tourist offer for this type of visitor, and those weekends spent on a bicycle in nature, they redeveloped the idea – to finish the family story, which began in the eighties, according to the original plan, and bring it to a 100% hospitality-tourist function.
And finally, after almost 3 years, we obtained a decision approving the performance of hospitality activities (which includes accommodation) in the rural holiday home Villa Lipica. The house is categorized in the maximum category for rural holiday homes with 4 suns, and its equipment and solutions meet the requirements for a 5-star categorization. It is designed to accommodate up to 10 people with 3 bedrooms, two of which have their own bathrooms, and it also has a wellness area with a sauna and a hot tub. In the future, the construction of an outdoor swimming pool is also planned, for which we already have all the necessary documentation.
In parallel with the arrangement of the building, we continued the production of wine from our own vineyard, and the production was expanded by the production of other types of wine together with subcontractors. In the wine cellar, hidden in the basement of Villa Lipica, you can currently taste four labels of HARSAN wine (which is the historical name for Lipica, and comes from the Hungarian language where Hársfa = linden tree) whose quality and uniqueness are also confirmed by the awards won at numerous wine exhibitions. The entire year 2022 brought confirmation that the direction in which we are going in wine production is correct, and it arrived in the form of gold medals at wine evaluations for Graševina, Rhine Riesling and Cuvee Blanc. The crown is the prize for the wine Graševina ’21, which was awarded the champion of the 40th wine exhibition in Pitomača, and right after that, the wine Rhine Riesling ’21 was awarded a gold medal at the 7th wine fair in Orahovica as the best white wine.
