Rakvice sits where the loess hills of the Velké Pavlovice sub-region run out and the Dyje floodplain begins, about 45 minutes south of my flat in Brno. The old Amber Route passed this way, and the village still has the feel of a place on the road to somewhere else: flat, open, the Pálava limestone a grey line on the western horizon. I arrived on a Tuesday in late October with the vines gone yellow, mist still lying over the floodplain at 09:30 and the car thermometer at 8 °C. This is South Moravia, Czechia, at its least picturesque, and for one kind of wine at its most serious.
Miloš Michlovský met me at the door of the tasting room with a pen behind his ear and one of his own books under his arm. It was Vinohradnictví, Viticulture, published in 2017, the last of eight he wrote in six years. He put it on the table between us the way another winemaker would put down a bottle, and for the first half hour we did not open anything at all.
From Hustopeče to the Perná breeding station#
He was born in 1953 in Hustopeče, ten kilometres up the road, went through the wine school at Valtice, studied horticulture in Moscow and took his doctorate in 1985. From 1991 to 1994 he lectured at the Horticultural Faculty in Lednice, part of Mendel University, and in 2001 he habilitated as docent. His full title, Doc. Ing. Miloš Michlovský, DrSc., runs longer than most of his labels.
The turn came in 1994, when he privatised the state breeding station at Perná, under the Pálava hills, a station that had worked on Pálava and Aurelius long before he arrived. The company dates from 1993; the joint-stock company Vinselekt Michlovský followed in 2003, with him as chairman and general director. Today it farms about 125 hectares of its own vines, split between the Velké Pavlovice and Mikulov sub-regions, which makes it one of the larger estates in a landscape of five thousand smallholders.
I came to the wines through the books. A colleague in Brno lent me the Encyklopedie degustace vína, his 2013 encyclopaedia of tasting, in my first years in wine, and I read it with a pencil. It took me another two years to drive to Rakvice and meet the man who wrote it.
Ten thousand vines to the hectare#
Since 2004 he has planted nothing below 10,000 vines per hectare. The Autentisté charter, signed by the natural winemakers a few villages away, asks its members for a minimum of 5,000 on new plantings; he goes past double that. His reasoning is the one you find in his own textbook: more vines competing for the same water and light means fewer bunches per vine, deeper roots and a slower, more even ripening. “The vine should work a little harder than it wants to,” he said. “So should the grower.”
The breeding is the part I find hardest to explain to guests, because it moves at the pace of trees rather than harvests. From the Perná programme come registered varieties such as Malverina and Laurot, both on the books by 2001, then Rinot in 2008, Savilon in 2010, Vesna in 2012 and Medea in 2014. Most are disease-resistant crosses, bred so that a vineyard needs fewer sprays in a wet June, and he co-founded a research association called Resistant to push the work further. It is a different answer to the same question the organic growers ask, and I am glad both answers exist.
One correction he makes before I can. He grows and bottles Cabernet Moravia, and visitors keep assuming he bred it. He did not. The cross of Cabernet Franc and Zweigeltrebe is the work of Lubomír Glos at Moravská Nová Ves, registered in 2001, and Michlovský gives the credit without being asked. Breeders, in my experience, are careful about parentage.
Cultured yeast, steel and a book about sulfur#
The cellar is modern classic in the plain sense of the words. Grapes come in by variety and by must weight, fermentation runs on cultured yeast at controlled temperatures, the wines go to stainless steel or to oak according to what he wants from them, and sulfur is used within the legal norms. The labels follow the Czech quality ladder, pozdní sběr and výběr z hroznů, each step a minimum must weight at harvest.
He wrote a whole book on sulfur dioxide in winemaking in 2012, Oxid siřičitý v enologii, before any of the others. I keep a much shorter version on this site for guests who want to know what the word on the back label means. His is the one you read if you want to understand why the number is what it is.
“A wine is a series of decisions,” he told me, tapping the book. “I want to be able to name every one of them.”
Ten minutes east, at Velké Bílovice, Milan Nestarec ferments on whatever yeast the grapes bring in and adds as little as he can. I pour both men’s wines, sometimes on the same evening, and I have stopped apologising for it. One of them wants to name every decision; the other wants to make as few as possible. The glass tells you which is which within a minute, and that is exactly what I want a guest to taste.
One glass: Cabernet Moravia#
We opened it at 11:15, which he noted was early, and then poured anyway.
Škvarky, tvarůžky and a Tramín#
Lunch was laid out at the end of the tasting-room table: rye bread, a bowl of lard with raw onion, škvarky, a smoked pork neck cut thick, and a plate of Olomoucké tvarůžky, the pungent ripened curd cheese that divides every group I bring. We started with a dry Ryzlink vlašský from his Mikulov rows, lime and wet stone, the limestone speaking louder than the cellar. The Tramín came out for the tvarůžky, which is what people do here, for reasons no textbook has yet explained to me. The Cabernet Moravia finished the pork. There were apricot koláče for the drive home.
Michlovský on tour#
On the South Moravia weekend, Rakvice is the classic counterweight on the Saturday: a guided tasting of six or seven wines in the tasting room, poured up the přívlastek ladder in order, with his books on the shelf behind us for anyone who wants to check a claim. The same afternoon we drive twenty minutes north to a hillside cellar at Boleradice, where Petr Koráb makes pet-nat on the opposite principle. Guests who arrive certain which side they are on rarely leave that way.
On the day tour from Brno the stop is shorter, and I include it when a group asks for the classic side of Moravia rather than the natural one. Either way the visit is by arrangement, there is a shop by the tasting room, and the Ryzlink vlašský travels well.
The mist had lifted by the time I left. The rows ran off toward Pálava in straight lines, ten thousand to the hectare, every one of them a decision he could name.
