The grapes are hand-harvested, destemmed and gently pressed together. The juice ferments in old wooden barrels with indigenous yeast and is bottled under crown cap in the winter, to let the fermentation finish in bottles and give natural fizz to the wine. Unfiltered, unfined, zero sulfur added. Since the 2021 vintage, the wine is disgorged as the winemaker enjoys this âmore structured and preciseâ taste experience more.
Milan Nestarec
âMilan Nestarec is not a winery. Nestarec is ideas that just happen to be represented through wine,â reads one of the first lines on this Moravian prodigyâs captivating website. It is a fitting description: first, because the sheer diversity and dynamism of Nestarec cuvĂ©es reflect the centrifuge in his head (âmy colleagues must sometimes hate me and my constant chorus of âcanât we do it better / differently?â he admits with a chuckle). Secondly, because thereâs a gradual development of Nestarec wines towards more precision and âessence over styleâ, which absolutely reflects the winemakerâs personal journey â and itâs quite a fascinating story to follow. (And drink.)
It all started⊠uhm, thatâs actually a good question â where is the starting line for someone born in the biggest wine-growing village in the Czech Republic, where virtually every family had a couple of vines planted somewhere and made wine for their own consumption? Although Milanâs father originally repaired roofs for a living, wine was always present in their daily lives â so much so that Milan never even considered another career, ever. The family journey towards professional winemaking started when he was little, after the Velvet revolution in 1989, when the Czech state returned to them a tiny plot previously confiscated by the communists (the socialist regime forbade virtually any private business after WWII, including farms), and Milanâs father started to season-work in a German vine nursery.
Labor of Familial Love
Since then, every spare penny the family earned went into getting new land and planting it, sometimes to Milanâs chagrin: âI remember being a 13-year-old kid who badly wanted a computer, like any teenage boy back then. But too bad for me, my father preferred to buy 0.6 hectares of land instead. Obviously, I couldnât be more grateful for this choice now,â he gestures towards SlovenskĂ©, a 5-hectare vineyard that truly enabled them to go professional back in 2001. It still counts among their signature vineyards, giving birth to Nestarecâs ever-popular TRBLMKR or flamboyant UMAMI field blends.Â
Using the whole familyâs labor (âI worked my ass off there as a kid, as we couldnât afford to pay external helpers,â Milan recalls), know-how and second-hand equipment (âwe didnât have any money for new machines eitherâ) from the German vine nursery, the winery started to produce bulk wine. Milanâs father passed the winemaking decisions to the teenage Milan shortly thereafter: âMy classmates at the winemaking high school would boast âmy dad is letting me make my own wine, I have a 30l demijohn of mine in the cellar nowâ and Iâd be like âoh shoot, my father just gave me 40,000 litres to play withâ,â Nestarec Jr. recalls with laughter.
At that time, the winery was conventional both in the vineyards and in the cellar, although Milan jokes that âI couldnât be technological even if I tried â I just couldnât get it right, even when following the ârecipesââ. Another important tributary in his turn towards ânormal wineâ, as he likes to call it, was spending his âpocket money on bottles like Leroy and Dagenneau with some of my classmatesâ, he insists as we raise eyebrows at the thought of 17-year old country boys ordering costly biodynamic wines for fun. After meeting a couple of natural OGs both in the Czech Republic and abroad, mainly during a short trip to the Collio / GoriĆĄka Brda region on the borders of Italy and Slovenia, the path was forged. 2009 was the first Nestarec vintage using spontaneous fermentation, aging on gross lees and only a little sulfur.Â
Learning Curves
At the same time, an even more important switch happened in the vineyards when the Nestarecs eschewed chemicals and started to work organically. âLooking back, I see how essential this was, and how long the path is still ahead of us. Only now am I starting to see the little changes in the vineyardsâ vitality, signs that weâre treating them well. But I also see all the mistakes we made along the way â and Iâm very happy that weâre now in a place where I can afford to do things properly, and set a slightly different tone for the future, resulting in beautiful, wise old vines and nuanced wines coming from them. Iâm shy of the term terroir, so I call it genius loci instead, but you get the idea,â Milan smiles.
This is exactly one of the compelling shifts we mentioned earlier â Nestarecâs passion for aged vines recently made him buy selected old vineyards or work with Simonit and Sirch, the top pruning consultants working around the globe with names like Gravner, Leroy or AngĂ©lus. And thereâs also clear progress being made in the cellar: âWhen I started, I was mesmerized by heavily macerated wines, so much so that Iâd make cuvĂ©es that spent months on skins. When I dropped the use of SO2 completely in 2014, this would sometimes result in wines you couldnât even call orange â they were plain brown,â Milan bursts out with laughter.Â
âThen I had a short period I call âmaster brewerâ: no additives, of course, but I toyed with different maceration times and vessels and techniques like carbonic etc. for each wine. In retrospect, I probably wouldnât change a thing â thatâs who I was back then and I totally accept all this as part of my learning curve. But the older I get, the more I simply enjoy the expression of whatâs locally unique, without too much orange coverage. Loess is more,â Milan grins, referring to the light eolic sediment soil that constitutes a big part of his vineyards and works well especially with his beloved Neuburger and Gruner Veltliner white grape varieties.
The Chateau Life
Besides this âcoming of ageâ (despite having nearly 20 vintages under his belt, Nestarec is only in his early thirties as we speak) and the grounding influence of his wife Mirka, Milanâs important advisor and reality-check on all things wine and life, these changes have also been possible thanks to a new, bigger winery space they moved into a couple of years ago. Mockingly called âChateau Nestarecâ, the vast precinct on the outskirts of VelkĂ© BĂlovice is a polar opposite to the romantic idea of a shining historical building surrounded by manicured vines.
Milanâs chateau looks quite industrial, courtesy of its past incarnations (auto repair shop, concrete plant or coffin factory to name just a few), but it finally allows him to work with more precision and peace of mind. âAt one point in the past, we had wine in like seven different places, using literally every bit of space we could find around BĂlovice and MoravskĂœ ĆœiĆŸkov. This crazy situation led to some fun accidents â weâd probably never have WTF if it wasnât for the summer heat in my parentsâ garage that triggered the flor essential for the wineâs character â but at the end of the day, it was an incredible relief and step up to be finally able to work in one proper, big space,â Nestarec explains.
The winery also features an incredible amount of fun vintage stuff, such as an old 1960s Czech Jawa motorcycle in his fatherâs man cave. âI love it for its authenticity and local pedigree â thatâs always important to me,â Milan radiates â itâs true that all his wines sport a Moravian hybrid variety or a grape typical for Central Europe, such as Blaufrankisch, precisely for keeping the connection to the local roots. Not that youâll find the name of the grapes on the labels, though: âI stopped doing that some time ago, as I want people to approach the wine without any preconceptions, to enjoy it (or not) because of its actual taste and character, not based on their idea of the given variety.âÂ
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Blends and Field Blends
Since the 2018 vintage, heâs made a lot of blends and field blends. âI find that itâs something typical from our past, and I like to revive such habits. Plus it goes well with my belief that the best creator of all is nature itself â if my aim is to express the unique soil-grape situation we have the luck to have on some of our sites, and thereâs a beautiful old vineyard with multiple varieties that have grown together successfully for 40 years, why manipulate that in the cellar?â he shrugs. Nestarecâs top-shelf wines â iconic âWhite Labelâ cuvĂ©es like GinTonic, Podfuck or Juicy Fruit â are now made exactly like this, with grapes from a single plot (or two neighboring ones), that are just gently stomped and then left to ferment and rest in big old vats for more than two years to fully showcase the old vines mentioned earlier.
Milanâs more âeverydayâ wines from younger vines, such as the merry table companions Forks & Knives or the âMoravian realnessâ of BÄl, Nach and Okr liters, enjoy similar treatment, only with shorter aging times. The new, truly generous winery space also meant that Milan could invest in equipment that allows for more precision during the making of all his wines, from a sorting table to a special peristaltic pump that moves the wine super-gently towards the bottling line, which is a crucial piece of the winemaking puzzle, according to Nestarec. âIâm geekily obsessed with bottling â itâs such a fragile phase, especially for a zero-sulfur wine, where you can either keep all the energy you managed to harness in the barrel or completely ruin it. Iâve learned that every detail counts.â
Judging from the quality of his wines and the beautiful acidic tension literally jumping from his bottles (one of Milanâs uber-popular pet-nats is fittingly called âDanger 380Vâ), he seems to have learned this well.
- Jenny & Francois Selections