Dining on the Wine Trail: justWINE, Brno
Label artist and natural wine advocate Dante Minutello animates the Dvořákova location of this Brno wine retailer with energy and aplomb.
By the time I arrived in Brno at the end of March, on the eve of Natural Wine Fest, a short stay in Prague had moderated my expectations about the Moravian city’s natural wine scene. If natural wine culture in the Czech capital felt a little staid, I wondered, what could I hope to encounter in Brno, roughly a third of its size?1
It turns out Brno’s wine scene has its own Moravian spirit, perceptibly less encumbered by Germanic wine fastidiousness than that of Prague. Nowhere was this more apparent that evening than at the Dvořákova location of Brno wine retailer justWINE, where sommelier and label artist Dante Minutello summons a rollicking ambience reminiscent of the glory days of Bar Brutal. (Back when the latter had a bar.)
Born in Brno to an Armenian mother and an Italian father (both of whom were in attendance that evening), Minutello serves wine with the rebel flair of a lifelong outsider. He has a jocular common touch in hospitality and a manifest mind-meld with the younger generation of Moravian natural vignerons, having supported them at justWINE since 2017. (He’s the artist responsible for the imagery on the labels of certain Martin Vajcner experiments, as well as labels for Joyda ciders and Aleš Kovar.)
Some new friends that evening had taken care to warn me that justWINE2 is not, per se, a natural wine bar, but that it tends to become one whenever Minutello is working. A quick glance at the bar’s shelves showed their precautions unnecessary; in pride of place are iconic bottles from the likes of Tom Lubbe, Christian Tschida, and Domaine Ganevat, alongside Moravian legends-in-the-making like Milan Nestarec and the aforementioned Martin Vajcner. The selection is visibly more radical than any establishment I visited in Prague.
Earlier that evening I’d fled what turned out to be a momentary rain-out at the Natural Wine Fest pre-party, taking refuge at the Brno outpost of celebrated Czech beer hall Lokale with Austrian vigneron Florian Schuman-Irschik. There we ran into south Hungarian vigneron Horst Hummel and his friends. None of us had spent any time together before, but the unusual concentration of enlightened natural wine folk inside justWINE that evening soon put us all at ease.
I stayed out far longer than anticipated, opening bottles with a host of new acquaintances; at precisely the moment that even the light Central European wines were beginning to take a cumulative toll, someone appeared bearing a welcome tray of Brno pintxos.
justWINE
Dvořákova 24/1
60200 BRNO
Czech Republic
Tel: +420 774 153 262
FURTHER READING
A Zero-Zero Virtuoso Emerges in Znojmo: Martin Vajcner
Tasting Report: Natural Wine Fest, Brno
Despite being just ninety-minutes’ drive north of Vienna, the two cities couldn’t be more different; between them lies the cultural schism between Germanic and Slavic central Europe. (Here, as elsewhere in the Czech Republic, a significant German minority was subject to forced expulsion after WWII. A half century of limited exchange during Communism cemented the rift with the Austrian capital.)
Founded in 2014, justWINE are importers and distributors, and maintain three retail locations in Brno, including the one where Minutello works.