Gurdau Winery
Café · Czechia
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Gurdau Winery is a boutique winery in Kurdějov, South Moravia, founded in 2012 by Jaromír Gala and Zdeněk Hort, housed since 2022 in a striking curved concrete building by architect Aleš Fiala. It's known for mineral Riesling as its flagship, alongside Veltliner and Pinot Blanc, paired with seasonal tasting menus and guest-chef dinners on a terrace overlooking the vineyards. The property also has a wine bar, apartments, and bicycle parking for cyclists touring South Moravia's wine trails.
Kurdějov's winemaking tradition reaches back to the 13th century, when more than 400 hectares of these slopes were under vine; it lapsed after the Second World War, when the area's German-speaking population was expelled, and the hillsides reverted to acacia scrub until this vineyard reclaimed them. Josef Súkup runs the kitchen: straight out of catering school in Austria he went to work for the Czech chef Zdeněk Pohlreich, who was then opening a restaurant on Lake Constance in Switzerland, and stayed in the country for a decade, finishing at a two-Michelin-star kitchen before coming home to Moravia. He cooks the tasting dinners over an open kitchen built into the tasting room, in front of a fireplace shaped like a wine bottle. Each year the estate also presents its new vintages directly with its own enologist, pouring the previous year's wines alongside the person who made them.
What you see
From the vineyard road, the building reads as a green-topped ridge rather than a structure, its curved concrete roof planted over so the whole thing is meant to fade into the hillside as the vines around it fill in.
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