Why it matters
The producer
In 2004, Craig Stapleton was still serving as US Ambassador to the Czech Republic when he and his brother Benjamin, a lawyer, joined with Moravian winemaker Jaroslav Springer to plant Pinot Noir in Bořetice. The partnership was deliberate and specific: one grape, farmed organically in a region with almost no commercial Pinot Noir precedent, vinified with minimal sulfur dioxide. Most of their 22-hectare estate went to Pinot Noir from the start, over 75% of plantings, and that proportion has not changed.
Jaroslav Springer now works alongside his son Tomáš. The family side of the estate has deepened while the founding idea has remained constant: Moravia can grow serious Pinot Noir.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
Bořetice is a village in Moravia, the southern Czech wine region that runs along the Austrian and Slovak borders and accounts for the large majority of Czech wine production. The climate here is continental, with warm summers that allow Pinot Noir to ripen fully, and cool nights that preserve the acidity the grape needs to carry colour and age. Bořetice sits in the southern part of the Moravian wine country, in a landscape of rolling vineyards and limestone-influenced soils.
Pinot Noir is not the Moravian default. The region has historically leaned on white varieties, and Pinot Noir is grown in small quantities by a small number of producers. At Stapleton-Springer, the grape choice is a position as much as an agronomic decision: the estate exists to argue that Moravian Pinot Noir belongs in the same conversation as Central European Pinot from Austria or Germany.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
Organic farming at Bořetice means no synthetic pesticides or herbicides in the vineyard. The estate uses environmentally-friendly agents for vine protection and follows integrated, sustainable management principles. The 24,000 vines across Čtvrtě and Skale are maintained at a density and by practices consistent with producing fruit suitable for minimal-intervention winemaking.
In the cellar, sulfur dioxide use is kept low throughout the winemaking process. This approach, common in natural and biodynamic cellars, reduces chemical protection during fermentation and ageing and places greater demand on the quality of incoming fruit. The minimal-intervention philosophy extends from the vineyard into the winery without a break. The low-sulfur approach runs from vineyard to cellar.
Wines to know
The range in view
The range is built entirely around Pinot Noir, expressed across three distinct styles. The red Roučí cuvée offers lifted red cherry-skin notes and hints of strawberry: the fruit is light and perfumed, with the kind of freshness that comes from high-acid Pinot grown in a cool-night continental climate. The Čtvrtě vineyard wine carries damson and softer plum, a fuller, rounder fruit register that reflects the parcel's elevation and soil character. These two reds show the range of expression the estate draws from one grape across its named sites.
The Blanc de Pinot Noir presses the whole grapes quickly to avoid colour extraction and produces a white wine from a red grape: the nose carries acacia flowers, peach and nectarine, with none of the red fruit of the red wines. The orange wine takes a different route entirely, macerating the skins to produce a deep onion-skin colour. It reads, in the glass, like a copper-toned rosé with more grip and a broader, more tannic texture than either the white or the red cuvées.
A useful way in
A bottle to begin with
The Čtvrtě vineyard Pinot Noir is the right first bottle from this estate. It is the wine that most directly connects the named parcel to the glass: damson and plum fruit from a specific elevated site, organic farming, minimal sulfur dioxide in the cellar, and the freshness that Moravian nights give to Pinot Noir. The tannin is present but not heavy, and the acidity runs clean through the finish. It is not an imitation of anything from Burgundy or the German Spätburgunder tradition. It is a Moravian red wine made from a grape that almost no one in this region grows seriously, and it earns its place in that argument.