A story about chairs and Czech Riesling.
The girl
walked up, cool as a cucumber, and laid down in front of me.
Our group had just arrived at Sonberk Winery, an impressive 40-hectare estate in the South Moravian region of the Czech Republic.
We stepped
off the bus and spread out across the front lawn, overlooked by a
large, architect-designed tasting room. Phones were whipped out of
pockets to capture the moment. Indeed, the view from the lawn across
the vineyards is so stunning that it made the front cover of
Jean-Baptiste Ancelot’s book Wine Explorers*.
Hunting
around for a different angle (who wants to take the same picture as
everyone else?), I spied a large, irregularly-shaped plaque set on
the grass. Rambling sentences comprised of esoteric terms adorned it:
Universe Farms
was the title of the clumsy English translation. I read it and was
none the wiser. Was this perhaps a tribute to a leftfield
agricultural method practiced at Sonberk?
“Eames bench of the parallel world” - something had certainly been lost in translation. Was there perhaps a religious significance? Could there be someone - or something - buried beneath the plaque?
As I
mused, along came one of our group. She promptly laid down on the
plaque and started taking pictures of the vineyards before her. I was
taken aback: wasn’t this potentianlly - well, disrespectful? Reverie
broken and feeling indignant, I stepped away and left her to it,
resolved to discover if some inappropriate behaviour had occurred.
That evening, I googled Universe Farms and went straight down a rabbit hole. Click through on the link and you’ll see what I mean. It’s trippy. For reasons I couldn’t begin to fathom, Sonberk Winery had allowed Eames Demetrios (grandson of legendary American husband-and-wife design team Charles and Ray Eames, no less) to uh, create a Universe Farm on their property.
Say what?
To put it simply (sort of), self-styled Geographer-at-Large Eames Demetrios is the creator of Kcymaerxthaere, an alternative, parallel universe coexisting with our world. For the past decade he has been travelling around our linear world installing markers and historic sites that honour events from this parallel world. Eames is “on a journey to add to the imprecision of the world,” and he’s been busy conjuring up an alternative universe and creating stories.
“I install markers, forms, shapes and installations to create sites,” he says. According to the official Kcymaerxthaere website, “142.5 installations have been installed in 30 linear countries. The .5 refers to an installation planned for the Moon…”
I’ve
popped the map of Kcymaerxthaere
below for your reference.
Righty-ho, then.
The next
day I tasted my way through flights of wine samples submitted for the
2020 Concours Mondial de Bruxelles, held in the city of Brno (as
judges, we had been taken to Sonberk - the name means sunny mountain
- as part of our programme). A discrete but friendly Czech chap on my
tasting panel turned out to be none other than Sonberk co-founder
Tibor Nyitray.
How perfect was this? The Universe was obviously speaking to me. I seized my opportunity: when we’d finished tasting I asked him if he’d sit down with me to answer my questions about life, the Universe Farms and everything. Here’s what I gleaned.
Back
in 2003, Tibor and his partners formed a consortium to create the
best Czech winery. They went large, investing €4m
in the project which assembled 40 hectares of vineyards from a dozen
previous owners to create one single area of vines located 10 km
north of the Pálava hills.
Cue 28 ha of new vines planted, a state-of-the-art winery and tasting room designed by leading Czech architect Josef Pleskot, and the hiring of Oldrich Drapal, one of Moravia’s most innovative young winemakers.
Their
investment started to pay dividends in 2010 when Sonberk’s Rhine
Riesling 2008 won a Regional Trophy in the Decanter World Wine
Awards. In 2017, not one but two DWWA Platinum medals went to wines
from Sonberk (Pálava 2015 and Riesling 2014), and the 2020 results
were equally impressive, as you can see:
Sonberk has an annual production of around 130,000 bottles, most of which are sold on the domestic market, and judging by the praise and plaudits, the stated ambition of creating a leading Czech winery has been fulfilled. I asked Tibor about plans for the next five years.
“The goal is to achieve such success regularly. In the Czech market we’re well established, we combine wine with culture so we host a lot of cultural events at the estate. We’re trying to persuade people to come and visit our winery and create beautiful memories in this way. The big goal is to get into the US market and increase the ratio of our exports - we export only about 5%, but we’re looking for more. And of course, we want to keep the quality as high as possible.”
What’s the secret of Sonberk’s success and your Platinum medal-winning Riesling?
“We have an exceptional terroir for white wines, south/south-west exposure and poor soils, mainly loess. In the vineyards we work in the most eco-friendly way possible, the harvesting was only done by hand until this year. We strictly reduce the yield per single vine to 1.5 kg of fruit. For the Riesling Noble Rot, about 40% of the grapes were botrytised and picked on the last three days of that year’s harvest. We vinified them mainly in stainless steel, with a few weeks in 30 HL oak vats, just to give the wine some air. We made 8,000 bottles, the 2017 vintage was exceptional.”
We chatted
about the quotation I had spotted on an oak vat in the barrel cellar - quod hodie non est, cras erit - which roughly translates as “if
not today, then tomorrow” - apparently a saying favoured by
winemaker Oldrich Drapal.
And what
about the Universe Farm on the front lawn?
Tibor was less forthcoming about this, but after some probing, I got an explanation. The Sonberk tasting room features some fancy furniture, including some DKR wire chairs (Tibor’s leaning on one in the photo above) designed by (yup) Charles and Ray Eames, available through Swiss company Vitra.
While on a visit to the Czech Republic, Eames Demetrios was invited to Sonberk by the Vitra folks. Favourably impressed by what he saw, he decided he’d like to create a Universe Farm there: Sonberk’s marketing director approved, the investors gave it the green light… and the rest is history.
Having a Universe Farm on your estate certainly creates a talking point, if nothing else. I was fascinated to have learned about the Kcymaerxthaere project, and if you’ve got some time to spare and an enquiring mind, you can identify the sites nearest to you (and read the wacky stories woven around them) by consulting this page.
Me? I’ve resolved to be a bit less judgemental, and to stay curious.
*If you’re keen to try Sonberk wines, you’ll have to hunt them down as they don’t export to many countries (yet). They can be purchased online in France via Wine Explorers, and in the UK there is a limited selection available through Ellis of Richmond.