The place#
Forty minutes south of my door in Brno the land flattens into long, low waves of loess. This is the Velké Pavlovice sub-region of South Moravia, the red-wine quarter of Czechia: 4,580 hectares of vines in 2025, 70 wine villages and just over 5,100 registered growers. The vines belong to thousands of families, and the villages have a cellar lane where other places have a high street.
The town that names the sub-region is not its largest wine village. That is Velké Bílovice, ten kilometres further south: 748 hectares of vines and up to 1,056 growers, the biggest wine municipality in the country, where nearly every household owns a row of vines and a cellar. It is also one of the warmest places in Czechia.
To the west, Velké Pavlovice, Bořetice, Vrbice, Kobylí and Němčičky call themselves the Modré Hory, the Blue Hills, because more than half their vineyard area is planted to dark-skinned “blue” varieties; since 9 May 2011 they have shared a producer-run VOC appellation. Bořetice adds a joke of its own, the Free Federal Republic of Kraví hora, proclaimed on its cellar hill on 12 November 2000 with a president, passports and a rubber stamp. Boleradice, a village of about 900 people, lies a few kilometres beyond Němčičky.
Terroir: loess hills at 170 to 300 metres#
The hills roll between roughly 170 and 300 metres, low enough that the Pálava limestone stays on the horizon. The soils are deep loess and clay-loam with pockets of sand; at Němčičky the loam sits on sandstone. Loess holds water and warmth, which is what a red grape at just under 49 degrees north needs most.
This is the warmest, driest corner of Czechia. July and August afternoons run 25 to 32 °C; September falls to 15 to 24 with cool nights that keep acidity in the Frankovka. The risk is spring frost in April and May, which is why the good sites are on the slopes.
Grapes and styles: Frankovka, Modrý Portugal, André#
Frankovka is the backbone. It is Blaufränkisch under a Czech name, and on loess it gives a mid-weight red of sour cherry, black pepper and a firm line of acidity, closer in spirit to Burgenland than to anything further south. Svatovavřinecké, St. Laurent, is the softer partner: darker fruit, rounder tannin, the wine for roast duck.
Modrý Portugal, Blauer Portugieser, is the light one: low tannin, early ripening, one of the grapes behind Svatomartinské, the young wine opened across the country at 11:00 on 11 November. I like it lightly chilled beside a zabijačka plate of blood sausage and headcheese. André is the local child, bred at the Velké Pavlovice breeding station in 1961 by Jaroslav Horák from Frankovka and Svatovavřinecké and recognised in 1980: deep colour, firm tannin, a grape that wants a few years in bottle.
Whites still hold a large share of the rows: Veltlínské zelené, Ryzlink rýnský, Tramín, Rulandské bílé, Neuburské and Pálava. In the natural cellars they arrive as field blends, pet-nats and skin-contact wines; in the classic ones as varietal bottlings labelled by must weight.
Producers to know#
This sub-region has the densest natural-wine scene in Czechia and some of its most rigorous classic cellars. I pour from both.
Milan Nestarec, Velké Bílovice#
The Moravian name most often heard abroad. His father planted 8 hectares in 2001; Milan took over the cellar while still at wine school and changed direction after a trip to Italy in 2007. The family now farms about 24 hectares around Moravský Žižkov, organic since 2008 and certified in 2022. Spontaneous fermentation, old 3,000-litre barrels and acacia, no fining, no filtration, little or no sulfur. Roughly 95 percent of 75,000 bottles leave the country, so the wines are easier to find in Copenhagen than in Brno. See my story from Velké Bílovice.
Petr Koráb, Boleradice#
A trained chef and qualified lawyer who came back from Prague to make wine with his brother Marek in 2006. The label is Živá Hora, Living Hill; the farm is 3 to 4 hectares, organic and biodynamic, with goats. The cellar is a single arch bored about 100 metres into the hillside, worked by gravity and spontaneous fermentation, in what he calls controlled doing nothing. Pet-nats and traditional-method sekt are the heart of it. He signed the Autentisté charter on 28 October 2011. Read my afternoon with Petr Koráb.
Richard Stávek, Němčičky#
A farmer first: 15 hectares, of which 4.5 to 5 are vines and the rest pasture, orchard and field. The vineyards are field blends of old Central European varieties planted together, picked whole-bunch, trodden by foot, fermented on their own yeasts and bottled unfined, unfiltered, with zero or minimal sulfur. He and Ota Ševčík began what became the Autentisté in 2008. The story is at Richard Stávek’s table.
Jaroslav Osička and Ota Ševčík#
Two more charter signatories. Osička works in Velké Bílovice, caps yields at 50 hectolitres per hectare and ages in oak and Moravian acacia. Ševčík’s cellar is on Kraví hora at Bořetice: 2.5 hectares of organic vines, some over eighty years old, spontaneous fermentation in oak and acacia, whites raised in barrel and then in glass demijohns.
Vinselekt Michlovský, Rakvice#
The classic pole. Miloš Michlovský, born in Hustopeče in 1953, is a docent of viticulture and a grape breeder who founded the company in 1993, privatised the Perná breeding station the year after and farms about 125 hectares. Between 2012 and 2017 he published eight textbooks. Cultured yeasts, steel and oak, precision as a house style. His Frankovka after Nestarec’s is the whole natural-and-classic conversation in two glasses. See Vinselekt Michlovský in Rakvice.
What a day here looks like on tour#
We leave Brno at 09:00 and are in Velké Bílovice by 09:45. In September the Frankovka above the town has turned blue and burčák, the half-fermented must, is sold from cellar doors. Then underground: a hillside arch at 11 or 12 °C, the host drawing wine from the barrel with a koštýř, a long glass pipette. Bread, škvarky and lard with onion on the table.
Lunch is roast duck with red cabbage and dumplings, and two Frankovkas poured blind, one natural, one classic. The afternoon goes to the Modré Hory: a lookout tower at Vrbice or Kobylí, Vrbice’s grass-roofed stone cellars, Kraví hora at Bořetice for the passport stamp. We finish in a natural cellar at Boleradice or Němčičky, by appointment, with a pet-nat and a skin-contact white as the light goes.
That, more or less, is the Moravia day tour from Brno. On the South Moravia weekend the sub-region gets a full day, with Mikulov and Pálava the day after. My note on pet-nat explains why so many of these cellars make it, and natural versus conventional how I choose between the camps.
Practical: 40 minutes from Brno, April to November#
Velké Pavlovice, Velké Bílovice, Boleradice and Němčičky are all 40 to 50 km from Brno, 40 to 45 minutes by minibus. Vienna airport is about 1 h 40 away. Mikulov is 25 minutes to the south-west.
The months: late April and May for the open-cellar weekends; September and October for harvest and burčák; 11 November for Svatomartinské and roast goose. Czechia allows no alcohol at all behind the wheel, so a driver is not optional.
For the whole country, start with my Czechia guide or the longer South Moravia wine guide; for a private day built around one cellar, tell me what you have in mind.
