"Wine is Culture"
The Name
A mammoth tusk on the label, borrowed from the ground itself.
"Nepraš & Co" keeps things simple - a family surname, unadorned, next to the kind of "& Co." that reads the same in any language. The emblem above it does the rest of the talking: a mammoth tusk, a direct nod to the Gravettian hunters who settled this exact stretch of Pavlov some 26,000–29,000 years ago, and to the Věstonická Venuše unearthed nearby, among the oldest fired-clay objects ever made by human hands. It's not branding borrowed from nowhere. The winery describes its own work as one of respect for "predecessor cultures," and the tusk is that idea made visible: a small mark saying this family knows exactly whose ground they're farming, and how long people have been trying to make something lasting out of it before them.
The vineyards
Two plots, planted six years apart
The vineyards sit on selected sites in Pavlov, where a distinctive limestone subsoil gives the wines real minerality and a hint of salinity — even in Riesling, a variety that usually dislikes lime. Nepraš & Co planted specially selected German clones known to thrive on limestone instead, and the result shows: fruit-driven, full-bodied Rieslings with genuine bottle-ageing potential. Four named plots do the work — Stará hora (Riesling), Sahara (Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Zweigeltrebe), Pod Pálavou (Ryzlink vlašský, Chardonnay), and U Božích muk (Sauvignon Blanc) — and their German names stay on the label out of respect for the German winemakers who farmed this same ground from the 17th century onward. The 1.8 hectares under red varieties are farmed organically, like the rest of the estate: mixed herb and plant cover rebuilds the nitrogen and humus that decades of socialist-era farming had stripped out, and insects and birds — some nesting directly in the vine canopy — have returned as proof it's working
The Land
Limestone hills above Pálava, on ground that shaped prehistory itself.
The vineyards sit beneath the Pálava ridge in Pavlov, part of the Dolní Věstonice–Pavlov archaeological complex — one of the most significant Palaeolithic sites in Europe, and the very ground that gave its name to the "Pavlovian" culture. It was here, in 1925, that archaeologists uncovered the Věstonická Venuše, the Venus of Věstonice: at roughly 29,000–25,000 years old, one of the oldest known ceramic artefacts made by human hands. Beneath the vines today, that same land gives a calcareous, mineral-rich subsoil that lends the wines their signature — a real minerality, a hint of salinity. German vintners worked these slopes from the 17th century on, and Nepraš & Co still carries their old vineyard names on its labels — one link in a very long chain.
The Founder
A restorer of old buildings, then an architect of an entire wine culture.
Radomír Nepraš, who turned 80 this May, didn't start out in wine at all — he trained as a restorer, working on historic building reconstructions in Prague, Vienna, and Munich, before turning a lifelong passion for wine into a new calling. What he built afterwards shaped Czech winemaking more than any single bottle could: he originated the idea for the National Wine Centre, founded the Salon vín České republiky — the country's leading wine competition and tasting showcase — and helped drive the Greenways and 48th Parallel projects, along with the once-prestigious V8 Winemakers' Alliance. In 1999 he co-founded Vinařství Reisten, which became one of the most respected estates in the Czech Republic within a few years. After more than a decade there, he set out again — this time under his own name, with his son Ondřej Veselý, Reisten's enologist, at his side.
