Sipping the Pleasures of Istria Filip Horvat for The New York Times A waiter carries a glass of malvasia wine at a bar in Rovinj. On a recent afternoon, I found myself having lunch on a shaded patio about 20 feet from the banks of a placid river that empties out into the Adriatic Sea. The restaurant, Martin Pescador - named for the bird that skims the water's surface in search of food - is in Trget, a fishing village in the region of northern Croatia known as Istria. I'd arrived there after a rough drive down a 10-mile road that hugs the Rasa River and then traverses railroad tracks and freight depots and lumberyards before dead-ending in Trget. Docked nearby were about 20 boats, the same number as residents of the village. Most of the other lunch patrons were locals with shaggy eyebrows and barnacled hands. At one point, the chef announced that more mussels were needed. A fisherman pushed himself out of his chair, strolled to the dock, hauled up two yellow nets full of the shellfish, and brought them into the kitchen. The waiter presented me with a bucket of the day's catch. I selected the sarago, a sweet, fleshy white fish. It arrived perfectly grilled, following a chilled cuttlefish and squid salad and a bowl of tagliatelle with mussels, generously splashed with a brilliant local olive oil. Oh, and he also brought out a carafe of white wine known as malvasia istriana, produced by a local winemaker named Frank Arman. Its color was limpid gold, and it possessed a subtle saltiness that rippled down my throat. In the sparkling little postcard world I found myself inhabiting that afternoon, the wine blended into the background - and that was its beauty: it was a peerless, understated accompaniment to the seafood, and it bound everything together. It was why I was in Istria in the first place. Though I'd never been to this 267-mile-long coastal stretch of northern Croatia before, I had been drinking its most famous varietal for years, in the neighboring countries of Slovenia and Italy, where malvasia istriana is also grown. The malvasia wine family is a large and varied one, including red, dessert, Spanish and Brazilian wines that don't look or taste anything like the Istrian version. Originally it hails from the Greek island of Monemasia, for which the grape is named, and how it got here is a source of vigorous debate. Shakespeare celebrated "malmsey" in Richard III; Venetian merchants dubbed their wine shops malvasie. What's undisputed is that malvasia took hold in Istria like nowhere else: here and here alone, if you ask for a glass of white wine, malvasia is what they'll bring you. Like the grape, Istria has seen its share of coveters. The small, isosceles-shaped peninsula, 1,200 square miles, named after the Illyrian tribe known as Histrians who first settled there during the early Iron Age, bears the thumbprints of Greek, Roman, Venetian, Austrian and Titoist rulers. The Serbs - who like Croatians had been part of the former Yugoslavia before Croatia declared its independence in early 1991 - bombed Istria later that year. But peace came to Croatia in 1995 and Istria's status as a much-visited destination returned shortly thereafter. Still, Istria's fame does not approach that of Dubrovnik at the southern endpoint of Croatia or of Trieste to the north. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves - Istria is not St.-Tropez," one of its winemakers told me, with characteristic modesty. Fair enough: the coin of the realm here isn't decadent seaside resorts or wallet-hemorrhaging restaurants. Much like the grape that dominates its landscape, Istria is content with its own neon-free deliciousness. From the Trieste airport, where I landed on a Saturday morning, I drove my rental car down smooth and uncluttered tollways, first traversing the rugged karst limestone corridor of northeastern Italy, then through a sliver of Slovenia. A half-hour into my journey, I could see the Adriatic shimmering off to the west and, from the opposite side of the road, valleys lush with well-tended vines. Forty-five minutes after that, I was in Porec and receiving my first glass of malvasia istriana. Robert Draper is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and National Geographic and a correspondent for GQ.