Why it matters
The producer
Vinařství Plenér is a small organic winery in Pavlov, a village at the foot of the Pálava hills in South Moravia. Dominika Černohorská makes the wine. Ivo Marek, who was working as an orthodontist, co-founded the estate with her in 2016. Neither came from a winemaking family. They revived dormant parcels across three villages and built a range around dry, unfiltered wines that carry the limestone character of the place.
The name Plenér comes from the Czech term for painting outdoors, en plein air. The idea it carries into the winery is directness: wine made in the landscape, from what the parcels give, without correction in the cellar. That framing runs through every decision in the range, from spontaneous fermentation to bottling without filtration.
Place and vineyards
Where the wines begin
Pálava is a limestone ridge in South Moravia, close to the Austrian and Slovak borders, rising above the floodplain of the Dyje and Morava rivers. The Pálava Protected Landscape Area covers a compact stretch of rocky slopes, dry grassland, and old vineyard sites that have been worked intermittently for centuries. The climate here is among the warmest and driest in the Czech Republic, a continental character with long summer days and cool nights that preserves acidity in the grapes even at full ripeness.
Plenér farms three separate village sites along the limestone base: Klentnice to the northwest, Pavlov in the centre, and Bavorov to the south. Each sits on the same parent rock but at slightly different elevations and exposures. The limestone running through all three sites inclines the wines toward a mineral, saline quality that Černohorská and Marek have adopted as the estate's working description: dry, salty, true.
In the cellar
Vineyards and cellar
Organic farming across all five hectares covers the full range of practices: no synthetic chemistry in the vineyard, attention to soil health and natural growing cycles, and a low-intervention approach that lets the vine set its own rhythm. Organic farming begins with respect for nature and natural cycles.
In the cellar, spontaneous fermentation with native yeasts is the central choice. Native ferments take longer and behave less predictably than commercial yeast ferments, but they carry more of the site's microbial character into the finished wine. Bottling without filtration preserves natural sediment and protein, giving the wines a fuller texture. Minimal sulfite additions keep the wine alive in the bottle rather than stabilised into a fixed state. Select whites, including the Chardonnay, are macerated on their skins before pressing, extracting phenolics, colour, and texture that straight-pressed whites do not carry.
Wines to know
The range in view
The range reads in three groups. Single-variety whites come from individual limestone parcels across the three village sites: Sylvánské zelené (Green Sylvaner), Vlašák (Welschriesling), Chardonnay, Pálava, and Müller-Thurgau are among the varieties vinified separately. The Chardonnay is skin-macerated, which gives it more body and a faintly amber edge compared to the other whites. Pálava is a Moravian grape crossing of Traminer and Müller-Thurgau, bred for the region's warm climate; it brings aromatic richness with a dry finish when handled without residual sugar.
The field-blend cuvées sit at the centre of the range: Cuvée Leonard (white) and Rosé Leonard, both made from multiple varieties harvested together from a single parcel and fermented as a combined lot. The precise variety composition of each blend is not publicly specified, which is consistent with field-blend logic: the parcel and the year determine what goes in, not a fixed recipe.
A useful way in
A bottle to begin with
Cuvée Leonard is the white field blend from a single parcel, harvested with all varieties together, fermented spontaneously, and bottled without filtration. It is the bottle where the limestone site, the field-blend philosophy, and the unfiltered cellar work all land in the same glass. The wine is dry, with a saline mineral finish, moderate body from the mix of varieties, and the slight textural weight that unfined, unfiltered whites carry. It does not taste like any single variety; it tastes like the parcel. Start here to understand what Plenér is farming and what Dominika Černohorská does with it in the cellar.