Milan Nestarec ‘Forks and Knives’ Red 2020
Location: Czech Republic
Winemaker: Milan Nestarec
Grapes: Blaufrankisch, St. Laurent, and Pinot Noir
Soil: Loess, sand
Winemaking: Grapes are hand-harvested, selected on sorting table and destemmed, then undergo carbonic maceration and alcoholic fermentation with indigenous yeasts in tanks. Aged in stainless steel and big neutral barrels of 600 and 3000 liters for about 17 months in order to naturally settle. Bottled under crown caps to keep the wine’s energy. No sulfur added, no fining, no filtration.
‘Forks and Knives’ Red: as Milan puts it himself, “an addictive mix of the pinotish je-ne-sais-quoi and cheeky Moravian spice. Wine to be smashed thoroughly chilled, along with some food – nothing more, nothing less.”
From the importer Jenny & François: It all started… uhm, that’s actually a good question – 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.
Using the whole family’s labor, know-how and second-hand equipment from the nursery, the winery started to produce bulk wine. At that time, the winery was conventional both in the vineyards and in the cellar. After meeting a couple of natural OGs both in the Czech Republic and abroad, mainly during a short trip to the Collio/Goriška 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. At the same time, an even more important switch happened in the vineyards when the Nestarecs eschewed chemicals and started to work organically.
Since the 2018 vintage, Milan has barely made any single-varietal wines, opting instead for blends and mainly field blends. 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. 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. “I’m geekily obsessed with bottling – it’s 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. I’ve learned that every detail counts.”