Němčičky is forty kilometres south-east of my door in Brno, forty minutes on a clear morning. It is one of the five villages of the Modré Hory, the Blue Hills of the Velké Pavlovice sub-region of South Moravia, in Czechia, so called because more than half of their vines are dark-skinned varieties. The village is hilly, around 250 to 300 metres, on loam over sandstone, and it has a farm that also makes wine. The farmer is Richard Stávek.
I came on a Tuesday in the second week of October. Fog was still lying in the hollow below the village at 09:00, the thermometer read 9 °C, and the first thing I heard when I got out of the car was not a pump or a press but sheep. Richard was in the orchard with a crate of apples and did not hurry to put it down.
A farmer who also makes wine#
Richard was born in Němčičky. He has farmed the family’s land since the 1990s and made wine since the middle of that decade. The farm is 15 hectares. Vines take up 4.5 to 5 of them; the rest is pasture, orchard and arable field. There are sheep and goats, and the goats give cheese. There are bees, and the bees give honey. He also writes a blog, (Ne)vinné zápisky, whose title is a Czech pun on innocent and wine-related that I have never managed to carry into another language.
I put this first because it is the key to the wines. Most winemakers I visit farm vines. Richard farms, and some of what he farms is vines.
I met the wines before the man, on the list at La Degustation in Prague some years ago: a cloudy field blend that I asked the sommelier about twice. The same name turns up at Noma in Copenhagen and, through the importer Jenny & Francois, in the United States. That is a long reach for a farm with five hectares of vines and, as far as I know, no public tasting room, and it is why I bring guests here myself rather than sending them.
The Autentisté charter, from the vineyard up#
In 2008 Richard and Ota Ševčík, whose cellar is on Kraví hora at nearby Bořetice, began the conversation that became the Autentisté, the Moravian association of winemakers who make what Czech calls autentické víno. The charter was signed on 28 October 2011 by seven of them, Richard among them. It is a short document and a strict one: no herbicides, synthetic insecticides or fertilisers; yields capped at 50 hectolitres per hectare; hand harvest; a preference for traditional Central European varieties; spontaneous fermentation; only sulfur, bentonite and fresh egg white permitted as additives; no enzymes, added tannin or nutrients; wood, ceramic or glass preferred; no chaptalisation; total sulfur no higher than 100 mg/l in whites and 80 in reds.
Richard’s own version is shorter still: the wine begins in the vineyard, and every bottle should carry the mark of its site, its vintage and the hand that made it. If you want the wider movement set out plainly, I have written up what natural wine actually is; the charter is one of the clearest local answers to that question I know.
Field blends on loam and sandstone#
The vineyards are scattered across the village in the Moravian way: Bočky, Veselý, Odměry, Kolberg, Novosády, and a few rows over the hill in Velké Pavlovice. Veselý is 0.3 hectares, Kolberg 0.4, Odměry about one. The soil is loam over sandstone with pockets of loess, sand and clay.
What makes these plots unusual is not their size but their planting. Instead of one variety per row, Richard plants the old Central European varieties together in the same vineyard, the field blend that Vienna calls Gemischter Satz. Veselý is the purest example. The grapes ripen at slightly different moments, are picked together and go into the same vat, and the wine that comes out belongs to the plot rather than to a grape.
The cellar work follows from that. Whole bunches, stems included, trodden by foot. Fermentation on the yeasts that come in on the skins and nothing else. Some reds go through a semi-carbonic phase, whole berries fermenting inside themselves before they are pressed. Then about ten months in barrel: he seasons his own oak staves, which the cooper Stockinger turns into barrels, so even the wood has a local biography. Nothing is fined or filtered, and sulfur is either zero or a minimal dose. The macerated whites, the orange wines, are then held in bottle for a long time before release, which is where their calm comes from.
The public shorthand for all this is radically low-tech, and it fits. Standing in the cellar at 11 °C I counted more barrels than machines. The labels read like a map of the village: Veselý, Kolberg, Odměry, Špigle-Bočky, Mladý Boček, Divý Ryšák, Vysoký.
“By the time the grapes reach me the vineyard has made most of the decisions,” Richard said. “I try not to overrule it.”
One glass: Veselý#
We tasted at a plank table in the cellar doorway, where the light was better.
Beside it we opened his Ryzlink rýnský, a Riesling grown the same way and quieter for it, lime peel and wet stone, and a pet-nat that had finished its fermentation in the bottle and was still cloudy with its own yeast. Three wines, three ideas, one set of hands.
The farm table#
Lunch came out of the house. Fresh goat’s cheese, an hour old, lightly salted. The honey. Dark bread. Apples and pears from the orchard I had watched Richard walk out of, and a bowl of walnuts. The main dish was a pan of lamb from the farm, cooked slowly with garlic, marjoram and onions, with potatoes in their skins.
With the lamb we drank his Merlot, made the same unhurried way: lean, herbal, more sour cherry than plum, the tannin softened by ten months in his own oak. It behaved like a local. Nothing on the table had travelled more than a few hundred metres, and the wine least of all.
Němčičky on tour#
On my South Moravia weekend Němčičky is the counterweight to the day’s classic cellar: a morning of controlled fermentation and stainless steel at a large estate, then an afternoon here, where the fermentation controls itself. On the Moravia day tour from Brno the farm is an afternoon stop, forty minutes from the city, and on some dates we pair it with Petr Koráb’s hillside cellar at Boleradice, a few kilometres down the road.
Do not expect a tasting room. Visits are arranged personally and in advance, and the group stays small enough to fit around one table. Wear boots, because it is a farm, and bring a jumper for the cellar. Czech law allows no alcohol at all behind the wheel; my driver waits by the orchard.
I left at 15:00 with a bottle of Veselý, a jar of honey and mud on both shoes. Somewhere behind me the sheep were still making the only noise on the hill.
