A Croatian tech firm has quietly built what may be the most detailed wine map ever made. WorldWineryMap.com, launched by M.G. Solutions from the Istrian town of Umag, plots more than 4.3 million vineyards and around 100,000 wineries across 90 countries on a single interactive platform.
The scope is startling. The database holds 98,719 wine-region boundaries — from big appellations like Burgundy and Napa Valley down to individually named vineyard sites — including 2,815 wine regions, sub-regions and appellations plus 95,904 named vineyard locations. Everything was assembled by processing over four million spatial polygons, with terrain data drawn from the Copernicus GLO-30 satellite model. Click on a parcel and you can see its elevation (shown as a range for bigger plots, using up to 16 control points), slope, exposure, and in many cases rainfall, wind, solar radiation, soil type and geology.
For travellers, the practical hook is the geolocation tool: it finds wineries near you and gives directions to individual estates anywhere in the world. Planning a tasting route through Istria rather than Tuscany? The map works just as well for either.
Croatia itself gets impressive coverage. The platform includes more than 53,000 Croatian vineyards and 680 wineries, organised into the country's four official wine regions, 12 sub-regions and 72 wine-growing areas. Regional boundaries follow legislation and official government sources — in Croatia's case, the national vineyard rules from the Official Gazette (NN 81/2022) — so what you see reflects real legal appellation borders, not rough approximations.
The project has made noise well beyond the Balkans, with coverage reported in more than 25 countries including the US, Italy, Spain, Brazil, South Africa, India and New Zealand. Founder Matija Gavrilović says the goal is to combine fine-grained geography with climate data to build a sharper picture of individual vineyards. Beyond holiday planning, the team expects researchers and the wine trade to use the archive to track how shifting environmental conditions are reshaping wine regions.
Why should a wine-loving traveller care? Because this solves a real problem: finding the actual producer behind a bottle you loved, or discovering small family estates a few kilometres off the coastal road that no aggregator lists. Istria is a perfect testing ground — Malvazija and Teran country within easy reach of Rovinj or Poreč — and the map puts thousands of parcels like these, from Styria to Santorini, into one place. It's also a nice piece of trivia that a small Adriatic town, not Napa or Bordeaux, built the world's most complete atlas of wine.
