GinTonic, 2018, Milan Nestarec, 0,75l

I'm not much of a cocktail drinker, so I had to make a G&T of my own… Probably our most famous wine. When the 2015 juice (our first edition of this wine) was fermenting, its aroma was super reminiscent of juniper berries and its slightly bitter aftertaste of tonic. As a result, 1) everybody in the winery was constantly tasting it on barrel 2) it earned “GT” as a working title scribbled on the barrel - and the name has stuck with it ever since.

It's based on Sauvignon Blanc - hence the original claim “I am feeling supersonic, Sauvignon Blanc is my Gin and Tonic”. I remember a time when winemakers in our village used to say “if you don't have sauvignon in the cellar, you ain't no winemaker” because everybody was trying to make a hardcore “nettle-y” wine from unripe pyrazine grapes. So that they could wow visitors with an intensely aromatic white, in the vein of then-popular New World Savvys. All this at the expense of taste because - obviously - the prematurely picked grapes turned into wines that were quite... rickety.

But I wanted something else - something rich and flavoursome. Like whole milk, straight from the cow. For me, wine is always more important than the variety, so in 2017 we added a bit of Veltliner from the same clay / loess plots (Oplocenka, Otáhal and Babušák). Depending on the vintage, we use more or less skin contact.

The result is a wine that doesn't taste or smell like Sauvignon Blanc at all. Probably because I didn't try to assign any roles to it or shape it into some moulds; the only thing I cared about was to encapsulate and transfer the energy this wine had in the barrel.