Milan Nestarec Steps Back From The Edge
During the late 2010s, many newfound natural wine lovers followed the bold young Velké Bílovice vigneron to wild new stylistic frontiers. Will they follow him one step back?
Since his first commercial vintage in 2009, Moravian vigneron Milan Nestarec’s wine production has undergone a wide-ranging stylistic evolution - one that belies his youth, if not his long experience. He has gone from conventional to organic to radical, zero-zero natural. As of the 2020 vintage, he has moderated this approach, adding microdoses of sulfur dioxide in the range of 3-7mg / L before bottling for his more limited, white label wines, while retaining the zero-zero ethic for larger production wines.
That this comprises an inversion of the usual commercial approach for natural wine estates the size of Nestarec’s is just another twist in a career full of them. I first met Nestarec during a tasting in Prague in 2015, and later encountered him at tastings throughout Paris and France. On each occasion, until visiting him at his estate this January, I left with mistaken impressions of his work. The pristine, tight 2013s I tasted in early 2015 were totally unrepresentative of where he was taking his production at the time; years later, in Paris and elsewhere, the oxidative, volatile whites and meagre, opaque reds were to prove quite unrepresentative of where he sought to take his winemaking.
In 2023, having expanded his family’s estate to 27 hectares and moved his wine production into a large, unglamorous facility on the outskirts of Velké Bílovice, Nestarec is more at ease than ever. He has the space and the financial wherewithal to age his white-label wines for two years before bottling, and indeed, they have become wines of impressive class and finesse. What remains to be seen is how the wider natural wine audience - for whom Nestarec has become a household name - will receive the ambiguous message embedded in this mild gesture of retrenchment. Should only un-complex, inexpensive wines be fully natural?
Quick Facts
Milan Nestarec and his family possess 50ha around the Moravian town of Velké Bílovice, of which 27ha are in production.
Most are young vines, averaging 20 years of age, many planted by the Nestarec family themselves. The family began farming organically in 2008, but obtained certification in just 2022, presumably due to issues related to the frequent acquisition of new, not-yet-organic parcels.
Grapes farmed include grüner veltliner, gewürztraminer, neuberger, pinot blanc, müller-thurgau, pinot noir, blaufrankisch, regent, dornfelder, and zweigelt. Soils are generally flat expanses of loess, with more clay in the areas around Moravský Žižkov.
Nothing is irrigated. Nestarec initially experimented with green harvesting, like his early influences in the Collio / Brda area, but has abandoned the practice. Yields for young vineyards today hover around 60HL/ha, with older parcels yielding much lower (like 15HL/ha for the oldest parcel of blaufrankisch).
All harvest is manual.
Earlier vintages saw Nestarec embrace whole-cluster carbonic maceration, but in recent years he has preferred to destem, employing punchdowns and pigeage. In recent years he has stepped back from extensive skin maceration on whites, preferring the aging arc of direct-press whites (with foulage). For selection-level wines, he prefers a very long, low-pressure press, between 20-25 hours.
Wines age in a variety of containers, ranging from plastic tank to steel tank to oak and acacia barrels. Generally speaking, native varieties age in acacia, while Burgundy varieties age in oak. Nestarec’s long-aged white-label cuvées age around two years in untoasted Stockinger foudres.
Total production for the last three years has held steady at about 80’000 bottles, 95% of which are sold to export.
Since 2020, white-label cuvées have seen microdoses of sulfite addition in the realm of 3-7mg/L. All other wines are unsulfited and unfiltered.
A TOTAL REPUDIATION
Throughout the latter half of the 2010s, as they became fixtures in natural wine establishments from New York to Paris, Milan Nestarec’s wines seemed to encourage a total repudiation of traditional wine aesthetics. They bore cuvée names like “Podfuck,” “Gin & Tonic,” and “WTF.”
Alice Feiring, writing in 2016, called one of his wines “all brown and all wonderful.”
“It has the fruitiness and acidity of an optimistic, tiki-inspired cocktail,” wrote Bon Appetit wine editor Marisa Ross of Nestarec’s “Forks and Knives” white in 2017. “Smells like Le Labo Jasmine Perfume and apples.”
Whatever one may think of it - or of the wines inside the bottles at the time - the commercial strategy worked: Nestarec became a household name among natural wine aficionados, and expanded his estate to its present 27 hectares. He got married and the couple had a baby. While their new house is being built, the family live in a small home at the edge of the winery.
“We call the winery a château,” he jokes, “because it looks like an auto-body service.”
Ensconced in wine culture since the age of thirteen in 2001, when he helped his father plant the family’s first vineyards, Nestarec debuted in 2009 as an early member of the Autentista group, alongside older Czech wine veterans like Richard Stávek, Bogdan Trojak, and others. Already influenced by contemporaneous visits to renowned organic (and proto-natural) wine estates in Fruili and Slovenia - Radikon, Gravner, and Movia - Nestarec had already embraced organic viticulture techniques, and ceased employing yeast and additives (other than sulfites) in winemaking early on.
“I was eighteen or twenty and I said to my family, ‘I’m changing everything.’ They said, ‘Okay, you are the boss of family now,’” he recalls. “But from 2010-2015, nobody wanted my wine. There was no success. It was very tough for me.”
In 2014 - an inauspicious, rainy, mildew-riddled vintage - Nestarec ceased all sulfite addition, debuting on an international stage soon after, thanks to the support of natural wine importers like France’s Fleur Godart and the USA’s Jenny Lefcourt. By 2016-2017, Nestarec found himself the poster-boy, among more mature wine circles - natural and otherwise - for the burgeoning natural wine genre’s more wild stylistic forays: flor-aged grüner veltliner, extreme volatility, camel-colored oxidation, and more. They kind of wines that appeared to need the contextual aid of his website introduction: “Milan Nestarec is ideas that just happen to be represented through wine.”
IT’S BULLSHIT
“In my country, natural wine is very very big in recent years, and everyone wants to make natural wine from non-organic grapes,” he says, as we settle into his vaulted brick tasting room in January 2023. “And a lot of people think if a wine is cloudy, it’s natural, or if it’s skin contact, it’s natural. It’s bullshit.”
We have just returned from a foray through the vast conventional viticultural expanse surrounding Velké Bílovice, which can resemble certain monocultural flatlands of the Marne. Complaints about cynical natural wine trend-surfing from vignerons who actually organically farm grapes are a familiar and understandable refrain, even in France. But I sense this phenomenon of cynical natural wine trend-surfing grows more aggravated the further one travels from developed natural wine markets. The Czech Republic appears to be reeling.
“I think the hype was huge three to five years ago, for wine in transparent bottles, the cloudy stuff,” says Nestarec. “Now the situation is returning to normal. People want to drink good wine. Not natural wine with faults.”
I’ve heard similar sentiments from my friend Jan Culik, an alum of Bodgan Trojak’s Veltlin wine bar, who later made a short-lived attempt to import Fleur Godart’s radical French natural wine portfolio to the Czech Republic. (Culik now imports somewhat less radical French natural wine to the Czech Republic as Alma Wines.) Isolated by a little-known language, as well as a longstanding influence from the conservative, technical winemaking aesthetic that still prevails in nearby German markets, wine lovers within the Czech Republic have proven exceptionally skeptical to unfiltered, unsulfited natural wine. (Ninety-five percent of Nestarec’s own production is sold to export.)
“I’m not happy about the term ‘natural wine,’ or ‘authentic wine,” Nestarec adds. “I talk about ‘normal wine.’ I make normal wine, because what I do is normal for me.”
In its appeal to individual winemaking liberty, the phrase “normal wine” differs from “Autentista” only in that there has, as yet, been no kerfuffle among Czech Republic winemakers over the Czech Republic trademark rights to the term. In my experience, people who insist on avoiding the phrase natural wine do so to avoid the headache of constant comparison to more radical natural wine. And lo, Nestarec soon explains that since the 2020 vintage he has begun adding micro-doses of sulfites to his long-aged, white-label cuvées.
“We tried bottling with and without sulfites, for years, because we wanted to know what was happening over time. Aging potential is what I look for, and for aging, a little bit of sulfites is better,” he says. “In terms of chemistry, it shouldn’t work. It’s maybe just to sleep better at night. ”
LEARNING HOW TO SLEEP AT NIGHT
I can’t help recalling aloud one of my favorite quotes from Alsace vigneron Bruno Schueller, who once told me, “Making natural wine is about learning how to sleep at night.”
Nestarec can appreciate this. Among his colleagues in the Czech natural wine scene, he’s become the poster-boy for rapid expansion of vineyard surface, thanks to outside investment. He’s taken on a lot of responsibility.
“We work like a family. Me, my dad, my wife, my sister, and my mom. Plus ten employees. It’s a lot of people,” he says. “But if you want to do a job in the details, you need a lot of good people.”
Beyond sulfite addition, Nestarec has also moderated his approach to skin maceration on whites, which comprise 65% of his vineyard surface.
“In the last two years I’ve opened a lot of my older bottles, from 2004 until now, and the direct-press wines are aging better than the skin-macerated whites. They’re more pure, more straight, more focused, with more details. So I’ve changed a lot in terms of style.”
TWO MILANS
Today, as we taste through current-release bottles, we sip a succulent cabbage soup Nestarec’s wife has prepared, accompanied by coins of red sausage and tufts of thick brown bread. I’ve never before warmed to his wines like I warm to many of them today.
“Moje,” a crémant of barrel-aged young-vine riesling produced with fresh must from the following vintage (instead of liqueur de tirage), is buoyant, expressive, and winningly complex, an outlier in the wider genre of natural sparkling wine. (Its sandy, saline tones recall Axel Prüfer’s rare “Peur du Rouge” crémant, produced in a similar way in the Haut Languedoc.)
The 2020 “Forks and Knives” white is a far cry from shrill, oxidative earlier vintages, a textured and vivid blend of grüner veltliner, neuberger, and welschriesling. The cuvée now seems delightfully undersold by its Justine Saint-Lô-signed cartoon label. As I understand it is an effect of certain proportions of more interesting, older-vine fruit once reserved for white-label cuvées are now included in the blend.
Among the recent vintages of white-label wines we taste, Nestarec’s 2019 old-vine grüner veltliner “WTB” (“What The Bílovice”) stands out for its vigor and poise. The 2020 “TRBLMKER,” a neuberger, is also possessed of an excellent wiry intensity. It is certainly the most refined neuberger I’ve yet tasted. Taken alongside the 2020 “JIL,” an opulent blaufrankisch shaded just slightly by low acid and a whiff of oak on the finish, the range feels worlds apart from the Nestarec wines I have been quietly avoiding in Paris natural wine bistrots for the past several years. (I reckon this is less a result of the resumption of sulfitage since 2020 than of Nestarec’s personal evolution as a vigneron.)
“What do you think about the future of natural wine?” Nestarec asks me, towards the close of our tasting. It’s a big question and my mouth is full of cabbage.
If I have reservations about the wisdom of systematically adding sulfites to one’s most ambitious wines, it’s because as far as I can tell - despite what the cloistered, conservative bent of the Prague wine scene might lead Moravian winemakers to believe - the global community of natural wine aficionados is growing, not shrinking. Devoted natural wine aficionados are generally also, by no coincidence, the ones prepared to pay more for longer-aged wines, and the ones with the most prior understanding of (and for) the fundamentally changeable nature of even the most well-made, truly natural wine.
My own reservations aside, I don’t foresee natural wine aficionados abandoning Nestarec en masse. His upper-tier wines are still excellent, still unfiltered, and still sulfited at far lower doses than many iconic estates of the natural wine world. And Nestarec himself, a cultivated, well-travelled, questing vigneron at just thirty-five years old, is not known to stand still for long.
“I have two Milans inside me,” he jokes before we depart. “One part of me wants to make classy wines, and sometimes I want to make more funny wines.”
Milan Nestarec
Žižkovská
69102 VELKE BILOVICE
Czech Republic
FURTHER READING
David Williams, writing in The Guardian in January 2021, manages in the course of a long paragraph about Milan Nestarec’s “Forks & Knives” white to say only that it is Czech, natural, and “funky (in all senses).” One can charitably presume he means both the original negative 18th-century sense of the word and the positive 20th-century jazz slang sense, but this, too, is a long way to say nothing at all.
Eric Asimov, writing in The New York Times in February 2022, notes astutely in references to Nestarec’s production that “over the last decade his wines have gotten better and better.”
To date the best writing about Milan Nestarec’s production is found on the website of his US importer, Jenny & François Imports, although it should be noted that the text is written by my talented friend Lucie Kohoutovà, who is in the employ of both Jenny & François and Milan Nestarec. Brava Lucie!
Thank you for this! On the topic of further reading, I feel compelled to note that Milan Nestarec recently appeared on my podcast about natural wine, called Lise + Vin = Sant, a Norwegian podcast which makes English-language-exceptions when it comes to interviewing winemakers.
Sincerely, Lise Aanes