For the table
Meneghetti
Bale · Istria
Istria is the part of Croatia that behaves like Italy, and Meneghetti sits deep in it, on a spread of vineyard and old olive a few kilometres inland from Bale. The estate goes back to the Austro-Hungarian years, when it was a working farm, a stancija; it fell quiet, then was bought and brought back over the early 2000s. What the owners built around the old stone is a five-star Relais & Châteaux that still runs, first and foremost, as a farm. The rooms and suites are in the original mansion, low and rustic under dark beams. Beyond them the land opens into residences and villas, a good many with a pool of their own. The sea is close, but the estate keeps its back to it and its eyes on the vines.
This is a wine estate before it is a hotel, and the table is where that shows. The kitchen at the Meneghetti restaurant is Michelin-recommended, and it cooks close to the ground: the estate's own oil, wine off the slope, produce from the gardens, whatever Istria is giving that week. It reads as modern Mediterranean, though it is Istrian at heart, truffle country and all. In summer a second, easier restaurant, Oliveto, opens over the pool and the rows. A wine lounge pours what the cellar makes, and a beach club a short shuttle away covers the days you want the water. Breakfast, taken slowly in the courtyard, is the part people describe afterwards.
We are drawn to places that grow what they serve, and Meneghetti does it with unusual completeness. Wine, olive oil and even its own distillates all come off the estate, and the kitchen leans on the gardens beside them. The hospitality is quiet and a little old-fashioned in the best sense, the Relais & Châteaux badge reading here as restraint rather than gilt. There is a spa with an adults-only pool and saunas, a family pool for everyone else, tennis and cycling if you want to move. And there is Istria itself, Rovinj and Pula each about half an hour off, hill towns and truffle woods in between. Come for the wine and the cooking. Give it two nights and the pace does the rest.
