Milan Nestarec is a forerunner among the young European natural winemakers. With his distinctive, funky natural juices he shows an excellent example of millennial wit and creativity.
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 Milan’s father originally repaired roofs for a living, wine was always present in their daily lives – 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 Milan’s father started to season-work in a German vine nursery.
Since the 2018 vintage, he’s made a lot of blends and field blends. “I find that it’s 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 – if my aim is to express the unique soil-grape situation we have the luck to have on some of our sites, and there’s a beautiful old vineyard with multiple varieties that have grown together successfully for 40 years, why manipulate that in the cellar?” he shrugs. Nestarec’s top-shelf wines – iconic “White Label” cuvées like GinTonic, Podfuck or Juicy Fruit – 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. Milan’s more “everyday” wines from younger vines, such as the merry table companions Forks & Knives or the “Moravian realness” of Běl, Nach and Okr liters, enjoy similar treatment, only with shorter aging times.
