Znojmo is an hour south-west of my door in Brno: 70 kilometres of road that leaves the city, crosses the flat country around Pohořelice and climbs gently toward the Austrian border. I drove it on the last Friday of October, when the vineyards of the Znojmo sub-region of South Moravia, in Czechia, are at their best: Veltliner leaves gone yellow, the Podyjí forest copper behind them.
My destination was not a vineyard but a lane. Nový Šaldorf lies just south of Znojmo, and along 800 metres of it stand more than 180 press houses, each with a cellar cut into sandstone streaked with blue-grey clay. Locals call them the Modré sklepy, the blue cellars, and the lane is heritage-protected. One of those doors belongs to Dobrá Vinice. Behind it, under Moravian sandstone, are Georgian qvevri.
The good vineyard#
Dobrá Vinice means, plainly, “good vineyard”. Petr Nejedlík and his wife Andrea Nejedlíková have run it since the 1990s, and in Czech wine circles they are described as pioneers of natural and biodynamic winemaking, which here means they were early by any measure. The estate is credited with bringing the first qvevri to Czechia and with making the first Moravian orange wine macerated in one.
The wines reached me before the cellar did. Years ago, at a restaurant in Prague, a sommelier I trusted poured me a white without showing me the bottle and asked where it came from. I said Austria, Weinviertel, a good producer. He turned the label round: Kambrium, Dobrá Vinice, Znojmo. I was 40 kilometres off and one border wrong, and I have been driving to Nový Šaldorf ever since to work out why the wine fooled me.
Petr opened the door at 10:00. The cellar was 11 °C and smelled of wet stone and something sweeter, the last ferments of the year. A dog considered me from the top step and decided I would do.
Granite, gneiss and a national park#
The vineyards are not in the lane. They are 16 hectares at Popice and Konice, two villages on the western edge of Znojmo, and they lie inside Podyjí National Park, the forested canyon the Dyje river has cut into the rim of the Bohemian Massif. This is the Popice near Znojmo, not the Popice under the Pálava hills where Sonberk stands; Moravia enjoys repeating its village names. The rows sit at roughly 250 to 350 metres on gneiss, granite and flint over Palaeozoic bedrock; the flagship white is called Kambrium for a reason.
It is cooler and windier here than in Mikulov, 50 minutes to the east, and the wines say so. Znojmo is Grüner Veltliner country, Veltlínské zelené in Czech, with Sauvignon and Ryzlink rýnský beside it; those three are the only varieties allowed in VOC Znojmo, the first Czech appellation, founded in 2009. Petr grows all three, plus Müller-Thurgau, Chardonnay, Rulandské šedé and, for the reds, Rulandské modré.
The farming follows biodynamic practice: no chemical pesticides, biological and organic work in the rows. I did not ask Petr to defend the preparations, and he did not offer to. What I have heard from growers in Burgundy and the Jura is practical rather than doctrinal: the vines look better, the soil smells right. I have stopped asking for more.
Clay under sandstone#
The cellar holds three ideas at once. Stainless steel for the wines that should stay sharp and clear. Oak and acacia barrels for the Podyjí cuvées that want air and time; Crème de Parc National and Národní park spend 12 to 16 months in wood. And then, in the floor, the qvevri: Georgian clay vessels buried to the neck, the same shape and the same principle I stand over every autumn in the cellars of Kakheti.
I explain qvevri to guests every autumn, so meeting them under a Moravian lane was a strange pleasure. The principle does not change with the postcode. Grapes go in, with or without their skins; the vessel is sealed; the earth around it holds the temperature steady; the solids settle into the narrow base and the wine clears itself over months. What changes is the fruit. Saperavi in Kakheti gives you a black wine. Veltliner in Znojmo gives you an amber one, tannic, tasting of dried apricot and black tea. If you want the vessel explained slowly, I have written up qvevri, karas and amphora.
The range runs in four lines, Natura, Premium, Qvevri and Pet-Nat, and across all of them additions are kept to what is needed. The estate’s own phrase is “without unnecessary additives”, and I like the honesty of that adjective: it does not pretend that nothing is ever done.
“Clay is patient and steel is clean,” Petr said, resting a hand on the stone collar of a qvevri. “I wanted both in one cellar, and I wanted the vineyard to decide which wine goes where.”
One glass: Kambrium#
We tasted at a plank table under the arch.
After the Kambrium came a Qvevri white, deep amber, its tannin drying the gums the way a Kakhetian Rkatsiteli does; then a Pet-Nat that was all green apple and froth and gone in a minute; then Trojka, the red blend, cool and peppery and poured lightly chilled. Four wines, four vessels, one lane.
Gherkins and škvarky#
Znojmo is a gherkin town, and the table did not hide it. A board came down from the press house above: dark bread, a crock of lard with fried onion, škvarky, smoked pork sliced thick, a hard cheese, and a jar of znojemské okurky, the town’s sweet-sour gherkins. The Sauvignon in the Kambrium and the vinegar in the jar are an old local marriage. The Qvevri white, which argues with most food, made peace with the smoked pork at once.
Znojmo on tour#
On my South Moravia weekend the Znojmo day belongs to this cellar and to the river. We walk down through Podyjí in the morning, to the Šobes vineyard on its rocky bend in the Dyje, and come to Nový Šaldorf in the early afternoon with an appetite. The tasting runs to about two hours; Petr and Andrea host groups by arrangement, and I book weeks ahead. On the Moravia day tour from Brno Znojmo is one of the possible directions: an hour’s drive, the eleventh-century rotunda of St Catherine in the old town, then the blue cellars and this table.
For guests who travel to Georgia with me the qvevri here are a bridge between two trips. I have watched people who tasted their first amber wine in Sighnaghi recognise it, eyes closed, in a sandstone cellar some 2,500 kilometres away.
A jacket helps; the cellar is 11 °C in any month, and the lane wants flat shoes. Nobody drives afterwards. Czech law tolerates no alcohol at the wheel at all, so my driver waits at the top of the lane.
I drove back to Brno at dusk with two bottles in the boot: a Kambrium for a table of friends who think Moravian white is a curiosity, and a Qvevri white for a Georgian friend who thinks the vessel is his. Both bottles are arguments. The blue cellars of Nový Šaldorf have been making them quietly for a long time.
