Podfuck

Different different but same. Harmony. Settling down.

Zadní Hora, Bilovice. Loess. Pinot Noir & friends.

During its existence, Podfuck has undergone quite the transformation with me: from a hardcore three-months-on-skins Pinot Gris to an elegant red where this grape plays the bridge between the dominant Pinot Noir and our beloved Blaufrankisch.

Zadní Hora is our first vineyard. My grandparents used to own some land there before the communist putsch in 1948, and we were able to get it back during the 1990s restitution. It was planted in 1988, my birth year. (Hence my soft spot for this plot.) It used to be planted with Blaufrankisch, but in 1987, our village was hit with severe frost that killed most of the vines. I have no idea why the socialist cooperative decided to replant this plot with Pinot Gris instead of BF back then, but luckily they used historical local clones, with very dark skin color. So dark that when my winemaking neighbour blindly tasted the first-ever vintage of this wine, back in 2013, he congratulated me on making such a beautiful Blaufrankisch or Saint Laurent. I tried to explain to him that it actually was a PG, but he wouldn't believe me, telling me it was just some podfuk (“cheating" or "trick" in Czech) of mine. So I just adjusted this heaven-sent name to Podfuck.

Each year, we’ve made the maceration shorter and shorter and started to add a tiny bit of Pinot Noir from the same spot, until one day the wine switched sides and became a real red. I love the noblesse that this tiny - erm, cheat - brings to the wine. I dare say that we have found its ideal expression, one that does justice to this early-ripening, forest-protected vineyard.

Hence the tagline: "Walk up to your own horizon" comes from an interview with the renowned artist Olafur Eliasson. I love how it reminds us that we don't need to be like anybody else or conform to others' norms. In wine as in life, we set our own KPIs...

Wanna drink this?  These are the guys to ask where to get my wine in your country, or buy our White Labels Tasting pack here.

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The White Labels are our top-shelf wines, the pinnacle of our work. Hailing from our most interesting micro-locations, oldest vines, and often field blends. This unique energy is preserved by the gentlest treatment and several years of undisturbed ageing in our cellar. Minimal interventions, maximum genius loci.

These wines speak about our quest for elegance in all our imperfections. Purism inside and out. Pouring in our hearts as well as all our long-term work and know-how, something I'm proud of. All that is reflected on the labels. When working on them, we took out elements that weren’t essential until only my signature and the name of the wine remained. Because, as they say, perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

I don't wanna look like a natural-born sage - it took me some time to get there. My journey, like many others, has been paved with gold engravings and curlicues, like on a fancy tombstone. “Nestarec, a wine for funerals”, as a friend of mine dubbed it back then. Oops. But I remember that period fondly - it's a part of my evolution. No regrets, like in that famous Edith Piaf song.