Terroir of Lake Zaovine: A Taste of Its Origin

In the world of wine there is a word for that elusive quality that gives a place its own particular taste: terroir. It is the sum of everything nature gives a region, its soil, water, altitude, climate and air, and the reason the same grape variety tastes different from hill to hill. Terroir cannot be moved or patented. It can only be found, and then protected.

Hardly anyone thinks of terroir when it comes to fish. Yet the terroir of Lake Zaovine is the quiet secret behind every tin of Last Catch 2016. Our trout is not simply well prepared; it comes from one specific place: the cold, clear water of Lake Zaovine, high on Mount Tara, in the heart of one of the best preserved corners of Europe. To understand why this trout is what it is, we first have to understand that place.

What Terroir Is, and Why It Applies to Fish

The word terroir comes from French and has for centuries described why wine from one vineyard is not the same as wine from the neighbouring slope. The same grape, the same vintage, but a different soil, a different water and a different air give a different taste. Over time the same idea has spread to cheese, olive oil, coffee and much more.

For fish, terroir means water. A freshwater fish spends its whole life immersed in its surroundings, so everything in that water, its purity, its temperature and its origin, is finally tasted on the plate. Stagnant, warm or polluted water gives soft, muddy flesh. Cold, clear, fast mountain water gives firm, clean flesh of refined flavour. That is why the terroir of Lake Zaovine begins where the water itself begins, in the mountain above it.

The Terroir of Lake Zaovine: Mountain Water at Nearly 900 Metres

Lake Zaovine lies high on Mount Tara, at around 880 metres above sea level, in the municipality of Bajina Bašta in western Serbia. It formed between 1975 and 1983, when the course of the Beli Rzav was dammed near the peak of Kik and the valley filled with water. In places the lake is around 110 metres deep. That clear, deep water is the foundation of everything the trout becomes.

What makes it special is the purity of that water. Lake Zaovine is known for its exceptionally clear water, so pure that, with only light treatment, it even serves as drinking water. Cold mountain streams feed the lake, and as the upper reservoir of the Bajina Bašta pumped-storage power station, its water is constantly moving and renewing itself, so it stays fresh and rich in oxygen. For fish this is an almost ideal home, and the first reason the terroir of Lake Zaovine yields such an unusual trout.

Tara, the Lungs of Serbia and a Realm of Endemics

To understand the purity of that water, you have to look around the lake. Lake Zaovine sits within Tara National Park, declared in 1981, one of the most forested landscapes in the country, which rightly carries the nickname “the lungs of Serbia”. Almost 80 percent of the park is covered by dense forest of beech, fir and spruce.

Tara is no ordinary mountain. More than 1,100 plant species grow here, almost a third of the entire flora of Serbia, and among them are dozens of endemics. The most famous of all is the Serbian spruce (Pančić spruce), an endemic and relict species discovered right here at Zaovine, in 1875, by the great botanist Josif Pančić. This slender conifer is a living fossil; it survived the ice ages and in the wild endures almost only in this region. It is called “the empress of all endemics”, and it is a symbol of both Tara and Serbia. Tara is also a refuge for the largest bear population in Serbia, the golden eagle and many other rare species.

The message is simple: the water that feeds the terroir of Lake Zaovine gathers in a landscape so pure and so untouched that it preserves a tree as old as the memory of the world. A region like that does not yield a mediocre fish.

Why the Terroir of Lake Zaovine Yields This Trout

Now all the threads come together. In the warm, muddy ponds of the lowlands, fish often takes on an earthy, muddy undertone, because compounds produced by microorganisms in stagnant water build up in its flesh. We wrote about this in our piece on freshwater fish preservation: clean water solves that problem before it even arises.

Lake Zaovine is exactly such water. The rainbow trout that grows in its cold depths develops firm, folded flesh, a clean taste with no muddy undertone at all, and the natural fat a fish needs to age well. That is Lake Zaovine’s terroir at work. It is no accident that, on the lake itself, within the national park, a certified rainbow-trout farm has operated for years. The place simply showed what it can give.

The Terroir of Lake Zaovine, Sealed in a Tin

Here the story of origin meets the story of patience. Taking such clean fish from such a rare region is only the beginning. The trout for Last Catch 2016 comes from Lake Zaovine, from the Triangle Fish farm, a trout breeder and processor that has operated on the lake, within Tara National Park, since 2007. So the terroir of Lake Zaovine is created not in a factory but in the lake and in time. Last Catch 2016 then locks that fish into the tin: lightly smoked and sealed in oil in the autumn of 2016, it was left to rest for a whole decade.

When you open a tin of Last Catch 2016, you do not taste only smoked trout. You taste cold mountain water at nearly 900 metres, the forest that guards a living fossil, and a decade of silence in which all of it flowed together into a single bite. That is the terroir of Lake Zaovine, an origin that cannot be copied, now sealed and final. As we wrote in our piece on millésime canned fish, a true vintage exists only once. Only 6,000 tins remain, and once they are gone, that place and that year can never be caught again.

How to Secure Your Last Catch 2016

For collectors and gift-givers alike, drawn as much by the terroir of Lake Zaovine as by the taste itself, Last Catch 2016 is available in three formats, with free worldwide shipping:

The Archive Edition of twelve tins (480 €) ships free worldwide, the natural choice for anyone building a reserve of their own.