Boleradice is forty minutes south-east of my door in Brno: forty kilometres of road that leaves the city, crosses the motorway and narrows between fields of maize and sunflower stubble. The village has about 900 people, a church on a rise and, on its edge, a hill with a door in it. Behind the door is the cellar of Petr Koráb, one of the small natural producers who have made the Velké Pavlovice sub-region of South Moravia, in Czechia, the densest natural-wine scene in the country.
I arrived at 09:30 on a dry day at the end of September. The yard was 16 °C; the cellar, when Petr opened it, was 12. A goat watched us over a fence. The fruit was in, the ferments were working, and the whole hill smelled faintly of yeast.
A chef, a lawyer, a hill#
Petr Koráb is a trained chef and a qualified lawyer who studied law in Prague and came back to Moravia to grow grapes. He founded the estate with his brother Marek in 2006. The brand is Živá Hora, the Living Hill, and the cellar was once known as Vinné sklepy Tihelňa. On 28 October 2011 he was one of seven winemakers who signed the charter of the Autentisté, the Moravian association whose members make what Czech calls autentické víno, and he and Marek are members today.
We have the kitchen in common, Petr and I, and that is where the conversation started: not with wine but with salt, reduction and timing. A cook who turns to wine tends to think about texture and about when to stop. Both show in his bottles.
I met the wines before I met the man. Someone poured me one of his pet-nats at a bar in Brno some years ago, cloudy and bone dry, and I asked to see the label twice. His bottles now sit on restaurant lists in Berlin, London, Copenhagen and New York, which is a long way from a village of 900, and the cellar receives visitors only by appointment. That is why I bring groups here rather than sending them.
A few hectares and a tunnel#
The vineyards are small, about three to four hectares at roughly 200 to 280 metres on the loess and clay-loam slopes of the sub-region, farmed organically with biodynamic preparations. The goats are there for milk and for the preparations. Petr has been consolidating scattered rows into continuous blocks, slow work in a Moravian village where every hillside is cut into many small holdings, and he has planted new Chardonnay. The varieties are the traditional Central European set the charter prefers: Veltlínské zelené, Neuburské and Ryzlink rýnský among the whites; Rulandské modré, Svatovavřinecké and Frankovka, the peppery backbone red of Velké Pavlovice, among the blues.
The cellar is a single arch, about 100 metres long, bored straight into the hillside. Grapes come in at the top and everything below moves by gravity. Nothing is pumped. Fermentation is spontaneous, racking is partial and rare, and Petr’s phrase for the whole approach is “controlled doing nothing”, which sounds lazy until you see how much attention it takes.
Two things are very much his own. Some whites ferment on their skins, the orange-wine route, for grip and texture. And some ferment with grape leaves in the vat, a detail I have not met anywhere else in Moravia; he does it for texture, and in the glass I read it as a cool, tea-like bitterness that makes a soft white stand up straight. The charter allows only sulfur, bentonite and fresh egg white as additives, caps total sulfur at 100 mg/l for whites and 80 for reds, and rules out enzymes, added tannin, nutrients and chaptalisation. Yields stay under 50 hl/ha, picking is by hand, and Petr keeps his sulfur additions minimal.
Then there is the sparkling wine. Pet-nats first: Riesling Lemonade, a Ryzlink rýnský bottled while still fermenting, and Orange on Leaves, where skins and leaves meet. Then Future Sekt and Orange Future Sekt, traditional method, second fermentation in the bottle. Petr’s stated aim is serious sparkling wine with the gravity and finesse of Champagne, made in a hill in Boleradice. If you want the difference between the two methods explained slowly, I have written it up in what a pet-nat is and is not.
“The cellar does most of the work,” Petr said, tapping the head of a barrel. “My job is knowing when to leave the room.”
One glass: Orange on Leaves#
We tasted standing, glasses on an upturned crate, halfway down the tunnel.
We opened Riesling Lemonade alongside, sharper, lime and wet stone, the sort of pet-nat that disappears at a lunch table, and a Future Sekt that had done its time on the lees and tasted of bread crust and green apple. The gap between pet-nat and sekt was the lesson of the morning: same hill, same hands, two different ideas of what bubbles are for.
The cellar table#
Lunch was at the mouth of the tunnel, where the light comes in. Fresh goat’s cheese from the animals in the yard, still tasting of grass. Dark bread, a pot of lard with fried onion, škvarky, a board of smoked pork, gherkins. Petr cooked one thing, a pan of mushrooms he had picked on the way to the vines that morning, finished with butter and a great deal of black pepper. The chef had not gone anywhere.
With the pork we drank his Saint Laurent, Svatovavřinecké in the local tongue, lightly chilled, all sour cherry and smoke, and then a Pinot Noir from Rulandské modré that was pale, quiet and more serious than its colour suggested. Neither wine needed explaining, which at a cellar table is the highest praise I have.
Boleradice on tour#
On my South Moravia weekend Boleradice is one half of a deliberate pair. In the morning we visit a classic, technically precise estate in Rakvice, Vinselekt Michlovský, with its 125 hectares and controlled fermentations; in the afternoon, Petr’s few hectares and a tunnel. Guests taste the two philosophies on the same day and, more often than not, come away respecting both, which is the point. On the Moravia day tour from Brno the cellar is a morning stop, 40 minutes from the city, with lunch at the table above. Richard Stávek’s farm at Němčičky is a few kilometres away, and on some dates we visit both.
Bring a jumper for the cellar and flat shoes for the hill. The tastings are small by design and the pours are generous. Nobody drives afterwards; Czech law allows no alcohol in the blood at all, and my driver waits in the yard.
I left at 15:00 with two bottles of Orange on Leaves in the boot and a jar of goat’s cheese on the passenger seat. On the road back to Brno I thought about how many trades a person can pass through before arriving at a hill, a tunnel and the discipline to do very little, well.
