Velké Bílovice is forty-five minutes south-east of my flat in Brno, and I drive the road often enough to notice when a vineyard changes hands. It is the largest wine municipality in Czechia: about 750 hectares of vines, around a thousand growers, nearly every household with a plot and a cellar, and one of the warmest places in the country. No town in the Velké Pavlovice sub-region grows more, and this is where Milan Nestarec keeps his cellar. It was the third week of September, the Frankovka was a week or so from picking, and the car thermometer read 19 °C at 09:00.
Milan met me in the yard with a sorting table behind him already wet from the morning’s Müller-Thurgau. He said the early whites were mostly in, the reds were waiting, and if I wanted to talk I would have to talk while he worked. I spent enough years in restaurant kitchens to know the rule.
A father’s eight hectares near Moravský Žižkov#
The estate begins in 2001, when Milan’s father planted eight hectares of vines near Moravský Žižkov, the next village along. Milan went to wine school from 2003 and took over the vines while still a teenager. He counts about twenty vintages now, which is a lot of harvests for a career that started in a school corridor.
The turn came after a trip to Italy in 2007; he came back with different questions. He later spent time with Aleš Kristančič at Movia in Slovenia, and he names Rudolf Trossen on the Mosel and Frank Cornelissen on Etna as the winemakers whose bottles changed his idea of what was allowed. From 2008 or 2009 he and his father farmed without synthetic chemistry; the organic certificate arrived in 2022, long after the practice. Today he works alongside his sister Lenka.
I first drank his wine in Brno, a litre of Forks & Knives White passed around a table of cooks after a late shift, the first Moravian white I had met that seemed to be in a hurry. This is not a place you drop in on, and most of the roughly 75,000 bottles leave Czechia anyway, for some fifty countries.
Loess, clay and a plot called Zadní#
Milan farms something over twenty hectares in a dozen or so plots between Velké Bílovice and Moravský Žižkov, at 170 to 250 metres. The soils are mostly loess and clay, with sand in places: the standard recipe of the Velké Pavlovice hills and the reason Frankovka, the grape Austria calls Blaufränkisch, does so well here. One plot is called Zadní; it belonged to the family, was taken in the collectivisation of 1948, and came back after 1989. Another, Úlehle, is 0.4 hectares of Veltlínské zelené, Grüner Veltliner to the rest of the world, bought in 2020.
The varieties are mostly the ones this part of Moravia already knew: Veltlínské zelené, Ryzlink vlašský (Welschriesling), Neuburské, Müller-Thurgau and Muškát moravský among the whites; Frankovka, Svatovavřinecké (St Laurent) and Rulandské modré (Pinot Noir) among the reds.
We walked the Zadní rows. The grass between the vines was long and full of grasshoppers, the Frankovka was dark and still tight, and Milan tasted a berry from every third vine without breaking stride.
A cellar with no magic powders#
The cellar is plain. Stainless steel, a row of old large barrels of about 3,000 litres, some acacia, and a press that Milan runs slowly. The grapes come in by hand, cross the sorting table, and ferment with whatever yeast came in on the skins. Whites get a short spell on their skins; reds are macerated gently. Nothing is fined, nothing is filtered, and sulfur is used little or not at all. Some wines are built as a solera, older vintages topped up with the new one.
His public line is “no gimmicks, no magic powders”, and in that room there is nowhere to hide a powder. “Wine from grapes,” he said when I asked about additions, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Nothing more.”
“My theme is energy in wine,” Milan said, and left it there.
I have my own gloss on that line: not aromas, not a list of fruit. If a wine has energy you pour the second glass without deciding to.
I will say where I stand, because I pour both camps and guests ask. This way of working gives things up: the wines can be cloudy, they move in the glass over an hour, and they want a cool shelf and a short trip from the cellar. In return you get a directness I do not often find in Central Europe, and wines that taste like the year they grew in. Both are choices. Milan has made his.
The labels belong to the same idea. Danger 380 Volts is a pét-nat of Müller-Thurgau, Neuburské and Muškát moravský, the kind of bottle I unpack in my piece on pét-nat; there are 230 and 770 Volt versions too. Podfuck is Rulandské modré, Rulandské šedé and Frankovka on their skins, pale red-orange. Umami is a skin-contact field blend of the Tramín family. Forks & Knives, white and red, is the pair meant for the table, the white in a litre bottle.
One glass: Forks & Knives White 2022#
We tasted standing up, between two barrels, out of glasses Lenka brought from the office.
The 380 Volts followed, cloudy and dry, elderflower and grapefruit pith under a mousse that settled fast. Then a splash of Podfuck from the barrel, redcurrant and orange peel with a tannin like fine sandpaper. Milan said nothing and watched my face, which is how the good ones do it.
Bread, škvarky and a duck#
Lunch was in a cellar lane on the edge of town, at a neighbour’s table. Bread, a bowl of škvarky, the crisp pork cracklings Moravia eats with everything, lard with onion, smoked meat and a marinated hermelín. Then roast duck with red cabbage and bread dumplings, because it was September and somebody’s duck was ready. We drank Forks & Knives Red, Frankovka, Svatovavřinecké and Rulandské modré, light and crunchy, at cellar temperature, and it did what a Frankovka is supposed to do with duck: cut the fat, then get out of the way.
Duck and Frankovka is not a cliché here. It is the reason the grape stayed.
Nestarec on tour#
The Moravian natural-wine circle is small and talkative. The Autentisté association, with its charter of 2011, is one part of it; Milan is the name people abroad tend to know first.
On the South Moravia weekend we spend a day in the Velké Pavlovice hills after Pálava, and a cellar of this kind is the afternoon: one plot, the barrels, five or six wines, then a table in a cellar lane. On the day tour from Brno it is one of two cellars, forty-five minutes each way, back in the city by 19:00. Visits here are by arrangement and depend on the harvest calendar, so I confirm each one before I promise it and keep a second cellar in reserve.
Bring a jumper. The cellar sits at about 12 °C whatever the day is doing outside.
I drove back to Brno with a litre of Forks & Knives on the passenger seat, out of the sun, and opened it at 20:00 with two friends and a loaf of bread. Energy, he had said. By 21:00 there was none left to argue about.
