Wine knowledge on Dante Minutello · Wine Tours with a Sommelier

South Moravia: the wine region Europe forgot to visit

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

The short version#

South Moravia is the wine country I live in. Brno, Czechia’s second city, sits at its northern edge, and within an hour or so of my door lie most of the country’s roughly 17,000 hectares of vines, more than 13,000 registered growers and four official sub-regions. Czechia makes less than half the wine its own citizens drink, exports little, and labels its grapes with Czech names that nobody outside the country recognises. That is the whole reason it gets missed, and it is also why a cellar visit here still feels like being let in on something. What follows is the orientation I give guests on the first evening.

Eight thousand years of wine: Gadachrili Gora and Areni-1

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Two sites, two different claims#

Guests arrive in Georgia having read “8,000 years of wine”, then land in Armenia a week later to hear “6,100 years” and the words “oldest winery in the world”. They ask me which is true. Both are, and they are not competing figures. The Georgian date comes from Neolithic pottery at Gadachrili Gora and Shulaveris Gora in the Marneuli plain of Kvemo Kartli, fifty kilometres south of Tbilisi. The Armenian date comes from the Areni-1 cave in Vayots Dzor, where a complete wine-making installation was dug out of the floor. One site proves that wine existed; the other shows how it was made. I take groups to the second and tell them about the first; this is what I say at the table, with the caveats.

How to visit a winemaker: etiquette, questions, buying

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0200

A gate, not a shop#

Most of the cellars I take guests to do not have a shop. They have a gate, a dog, and a person who was doing something else five minutes ago. In Chardakhi, in Kartli, Georgia, the tasting room is the family courtyard. In the cellar lanes of South Moravia, Czechia, half an hour from my flat in Brno, it is a door in a grass-roofed hill with the winemaker’s car parked outside. The etiquette of a winery visit comes down to remembering this: you are a guest in someone’s workplace, and often in their home.

Saperavi and Rkatsiteli: the two pillars of Georgian wine

Thu, 11 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Two grapes that carry a country#

Georgia counts more than five hundred native grape varieties, and I have poured a few dozen of them on my tours. Two do most of the work. Saperavi is the country’s great red, Rkatsiteli its great white, and between them they fill most of the vineyards of Kakheti, the eastern valley that grows roughly seventy percent of Georgia’s grapes. Understand these two and you can read almost any Georgian wine list.

Areni Noir: Armenia's grape from a 6,000-year-old cave

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0200

One word, three meanings#

Drive south from Yerevan for just under two hours and the M2 drops into the Arpa valley in Vayots Dzor, Armenia’s wine province. The first village with vines on both sides of the road is Areni. Roadside stalls sell homemade wine in plastic bottles, and the grape in those bottles is Areni. The label on a bottle in a Yerevan wine bar says Areni too. So does the cave up the side road where the oldest known winery was dug out of the floor.

How to taste wine like a sommelier (in a cellar, not a classroom)

Thu, 17 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0200

The first cellar of every tour produces the same small panic. We are standing in a karas cellar in Rind, in Armenia’s Vayots Dzor, between 1,400 and 1,600 metres, under one bulb. Someone has drawn a little Areni Noir from a buried clay vessel into a jug, the glasses go round, and a guest looks at me with the face of a person who has just been handed an exam paper.

Biodynamic wine without the mysticism

Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0200

The first cow horn I was shown in a cellar was in Austria, in Burgenland, standing in a bucket by the door as if someone had forgotten it there. The winemaker saw me looking and shrugged: it goes into the ground in October, it comes out in spring, we stir it and spray it. He did not offer a theory. That shrug is the honest starting point for biodynamics, and it is the one I reach for when a guest asks me, over a glass of Grüner Veltliner in the Wachau or Chenin in the Loire, whether any of this is real.

Sulfites in wine: the honest guide

Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 +0200

On every tour a guest eventually turns a bottle round, reads the back label and asks about the two words there: contains sulphites. It happens most often at a lunch table in Villié-Morgon, in Beaujolais, France, where one cellar bottles the same wine with and without added sulfur, and both bottles can carry the same warning. That pair is the whole subject in miniature.

Orange wine: skin contact explained without the hype

Mon, 14 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200

The short version#

Orange wine is white wine made the way red wine is made. Instead of pressing the grapes and fermenting clear juice, the winemaker leaves the juice with the skins, usually the seeds, sometimes the stems, for anywhere from a few days to many months. The skins give colour, tannin and a different set of aromas. That is the whole trick. Everything else people say about it, good and bad, follows from that one decision.

Qvevri, karas, amphora: clay across the wine world

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Three words for one idea#

Every wine region with clay under its feet has fermented wine in it. Georgia calls the vessel a qvevri, Armenia a karas, and the Mediterranean, from Rome to today’s Tuscany, an amphora. Guests on my tours use the three words as if they meant the same thing. They do not, and the differences are worth twenty minutes at a table in Kakheti or Vayots Dzor, because they explain why an amber Rkatsiteli from a buried qvevri, a karas-aged Areni Noir from Rind and a Ribolla Gialla from a Georgian jar sunk into Italian soil taste as different as they do.

Natural or classic: what a decade of pouring both taught me

Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Two glasses from one volcano#

I like to open a tasting with two glasses of Nerello Mascalese from Mount Etna, in Sicily, Italy, poured side by side with the labels hidden. One comes from Frank Cornelissen’s parcels above Solicchiata on the north slope, where the wine sees no wood and no treatment that can be avoided. The other comes from Benanti, the classic estate in Viagrande that revived its family vines in 1988 and works in steel and oak. Same grape, same black volcanic sand, same late harvest. One glass is pale, high-toned, saline, a little wild. The other is polished, exact, and built to sit in a cellar for years.

Pét-nat: sparkling wine the old way

Wed, 15 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0100

The short version#

Pét-nat is short for pétillant naturel, French for “naturally sparkling”, and the technical name is méthode ancestrale. It is the oldest way to put bubbles in a bottle: the wine is bottled before its first fermentation has finished, and the yeast finishes inside. The carbon dioxide that would have escaped a tank stays in the wine. No second fermentation, no added sugar or yeast, usually no disgorgement.

What natural wine actually is (and what it is not)

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Somewhere around the second evening of every tour, a guest puts a glass down and asks whether what they are drinking is natural wine. It happens at a family table in Georgia’s Kakheti, with an amber Rkatsiteli drawn straight from the qvevri, and it happens in a cellar an hour from my door in Brno, in South Moravia, Czechia, with a hazy Pálava. The honest answer is that the phrase has no fixed meaning. It does have a working meaning among the people who make it, sell it and argue about it, and this is my attempt to write that down, including what natural wine is not.