🇨🇿 Czechia · Moravia and the east
South of Brno, among gentle hills sloping down to the Austrian border, lies Czechia's great wine region: South Moravia, source of 96% of the country's wine. It is a different Czechia from the one of Prague's towers: this is the one of vineyards that run to the horizon, villages of dug-out cellars, aristocratic castles and long tables where you taste a fresh Veltlínské zelené or an aromatic Pálava, the region's flagship grape. It has been christened 'the Czech Tuscany', and with reason.
Its heart holds two UNESCO treasures. The Lednice-Valtice complex is an entire landscape designed over centuries by the House of Liechtenstein: two castles, a minaret, romantic follies, ponds and tree-lined avenues, all conceived as an immense garden. And Valtice, the Moravian capital of wine, keeps in its castle cellars the Wine Salon of the Czech Republic, where you can taste the hundred best wines in the country. Nearby, Mikulov climbs a hill crowned by a castle and a shrine, and Znojmo looks out over the canyon of the river Dyje and the Podyjí National Park.
This guide covers the vineyards of Moravia with a practical eye: what to see in Lednice-Valtice, Mikulov and Znojmo, how to get to Břeclav by train and move around the area, how tastings work in the dug-out cellars (sklípky), when the harvest festivals fall and why the best way to know the region is by pedalling its wine cycle paths. A different, tasty plan with no crowds, perfect to combine with Brno or with a break from Vienna.
Winegrowing in Moravia is very old: the first vineyards were planted by the Roman legionaries of the Legio X below the Pálava hill, near Mušov, in the first centuries of our era. In the Middle Ages the monasteries — Premonstratensian and Cistercian, such as the one at Louka near Znojmo, founded in 1190 — professionalised the growing, and the emperor Charles IV, in the fourteenth century, drove Czech wine forward by bringing vines from Burgundy and issuing viticultural laws. The aristocratic House of Liechtenstein, lords of the region from the thirteenth century, shaped the Lednice-Valtice landscape and regulated production, while the Anabaptists (Habaners) who arrived in 1526 brought their crafts. Phylloxera, which appeared at Šatov in 1890, destroyed the vineyards, and the twentieth century brought communist collectivisation. After 1989, Czech wine was reborn with force and today it is at its best. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The other Czech land: cradle of Great Moravia and of Cyril and Methodius, with Olomouc and its old archbishopric, Brno and Mendel's garden, Renaissance Telč, the southern vineyards and the designed landscape of Lednice-Valtice.
Read the history of Moravia and the east →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of wine in Moravia begins with the eagles of the Roman legions. Although the empire's limes lay to the south, on the Danube, Roman troops crossed into the barbarian lands to the north during the Marcomannic Wars of the second century and set up forward camps in what is today South Moravia. At the foot of the limestone Pálava hills, near present-day Mušov, a detachment of the Legio X Gemina, the Tenth Legion, was stationed on a hill still known as 'the Roman hill' (Hradisko/Burgstall).
And with the soldiers came the vine. Tradition holds that it was those legionaries who planted the region's first vineyards on the sunny slopes of Pálava, a warm microclimate that turned out to be perfect for the grape. The most eloquent evidence appeared in 1926, during excavations of the Tenth Legion's compound at Mušov: a bronze vine pruning knife, about 28 centimetres long, an unmistakably viticultural tool confirming that vines were already being grown at the foot of Pálava.
When the empire withdrew and the Slavic peoples arrived, winegrowing did not disappear entirely. During Great Moravia, the first great Slavic state in central Europe (ninth-tenth centuries), wine was part of life, largely tied to the Christian liturgy brought by the missionaries Cyril and Methodius. The seed had been planted, literally.
As across Europe, it was the monasteries that turned growing vines into a science. During the Middle Ages the religious orders — Premonstratensians and Cistercians, the latter heavily influenced by the great wine tradition of Burgundy — professionalised Moravian viticulture. The Premonstratensian monastery of Louka, beside Znojmo, founded in 1190, stood out; its monks tended vineyards methodically and passed their techniques on to the peasants around them. The monasteries needed wine for mass and for their economy, and that impulse organised and expanded the vineyard across the whole region.
The great leap came in the fourteenth century with Charles IV, king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, the figure who took the Czech lands to their peak. A lover and promoter of wine, Charles IV firmly pushed viticulture: he had noble vines brought from Burgundy — Pinot-type varieties — and from other regions, and issued rules to improve quality, regulate planting and protect production. Under his reign, Czech and Moravian wine gained European prestige.
Between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, South Moravia lived a true golden age of wine. The vineyard area expanded enormously, many villages received privileges to produce and sell wine, and the underground cellars that still characterise the landscape began to be dug. Towns such as Znojmo and Mikulov became important centres of the wine trade, which travelled down the Danube and along the land routes towards Vienna, Bohemia and the rest of the empire.
On that foundation flourished the aristocratic Moravia of the early modern period, dominated by great noble families that made wine and landscape a mark of identity. The most influential was the House of Liechtenstein, lords of the region from the thirteenth century: they arrived at Lednice in the middle of the thirteenth century and added neighbouring Valtice at the end of the fourteenth, and over the following centuries they shaped the whole territory between the two places as an immense seigneurial garden. That effort culminated in the Lednice-Valtice complex, an entire cultural landscape — with castles, follies, avenues and ponds — designed by a single family, which UNESCO recognised as a World Heritage Site in 1996. The Liechtensteins also planted vineyards and issued rules that gave Moravian winegrowing a new sophistication. In Mikulov, power later passed to the Dietrichstein family, who held the estate until 1945.
A singular chapter belongs to the Anabaptists. In 1526, fleeing religious persecution in the empire, communities of Swiss and German Anabaptists arrived in Mikulov — among them their leader Balthasar Hubmaier, arrested shortly afterwards on the orders of King Ferdinand I. Those settlers, known in the region as Habaners (Habáni), established themselves in South Moravia under the protection of some tolerant nobles and brought remarkable craftsmanship: glazed ceramics, trades and also agricultural and viticultural knowledge. Their presence enriched the material culture of the region for more than a century, until the Counter-Reformation and the wars drove them out.
So, between the nobility beautifying the landscape and the communities working the land, South Moravia consolidated through the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries its character as a great wine district, with its dug-out cellars, its winegrowing villages and its production geared to the great Viennese market.
The end of the nineteenth century brought the catastrophe that laid waste to all European viticulture: phylloxera, a tiny American insect that attacks the roots of the vine. In Moravia it appeared in 1890, in the village of Šatov near Znojmo, and within a few years, along with fungal diseases such as mildew and powdery mildew, it destroyed much of the historic vineyard. Recovery was slow and required, as in the rest of Europe, replanting the vines by grafting European varieties onto American rootstocks resistant to the insect. Many vineyards never recovered and the planted area shrank drastically.
The twentieth century added new wounds. The two world wars, and above all the expulsion of the German-speaking population from South Moravia after 1945, emptied whole villages and broke a winegrowing tradition passed down over generations. But the deepest blow came with the communist regime installed after 1948: forced collectivisation. The small family plots were confiscated and merged into large cooperatives and state farms, which favoured quantity over quality. Enormous areas of high-yielding varieties were planted, winemaking was standardised and much of the bond between the vineyard, the grower and the land was lost.
For decades, Moravian wine was above all an industrial product for the domestic market, with hardly any prestige. Yet the tradition did not die out: in the dug-out cellars of the villages, many families went on making their own wine for home use and for festivities, quietly keeping the knowledge the system disdained.
The fall of communism in the Velvet Revolution of 1989, and the privatisation that followed, opened a new era for Moravian wine. The land returned to private hands, a generation of young and ambitious growers emerged, and the focus shifted from quantity to quality. Many producers cut yields, recovered noble varieties and plots, invested in their cellars and began bottling wines of their own. Czechia's entry into the European Union in 2004 also brought regulation, denominations of origin and support, and protected emblematic products.
Today South Moravia produces around 96% of Czechia's wine, on some 18,000 hectares spread over four sub-regions — Mikulov, Znojmo, Velké Pavlovice and Slovácko. Fresh, aromatic white wine dominates: Veltlínské zelené (Grüner Veltliner) is the most planted variety, alongside Ryzlink rýnský (Riesling) and a whole range of perfumed grapes. A symbol of this revival is Pálava, a variety created in Czechia: it was bred by the oenologist Josef Veverka in 1953 by crossing Müller-Thurgau and Gewürztraminer, and was officially named in 1977 after the limestone Pálava hills, protected by UNESCO, where it is grown.
A whole wine tourism has flourished around it. The Wine Salon of the Czech Republic, in the cellars of Valtice castle, shows the country's hundred best wines every year; the 'Moravian wine trails' run 1,200 kilometres of cycle paths among the vineyards; and the harvest festivals (vinobraní) of Mikulov and Znojmo fill the villages every September. From the Roman pruning knife to a glass of Pálava in a sklípek, two thousand years of history are still alive in the vines of Moravia.