Our wines all the way to Tokyo.

Wine is no longer just a European affair. It is also popular in Asia, where our Danube won the Grand Gold Medal this year. Wine master Ján Krampl revealed more in an interview with Pravda daily. You can read the entire interview here: https://bit.ly/vinocomadrzinadvodou

You send your wines not only to the Wine Prague Trophy, where you became the top foreign winery last year, but all the way to Tokyo. What makes this wine destination attractive?

Wine was the cult drink of Western Christendom, but today you can find it in wine bars around the globe. The world is becoming globalized and Eastern cultures, this can be seen not only in the Japanese, but also in the Chinese, want to taste how the Western world smells and tastes. Wine is one of the representatives of ancient ancient culture, and even before that there were cradles of civilization in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Caucasus. There, people drank wine everywhere. It is a drink that accompanies and cultivates humanity. That is why it also attracts people from Asia. The new moment is that wine is no longer just a man's business. Women also drink, create and evaluate wine. Sakura in Japan is a competition where the world's best wine connoisseurs taste wine. This year, our Dunaj received the Great Gold Medal there, it is recognition of the qualities of the first Slovak red variety. 

If the evaluators knew that a woman was behind this wine?

In the digital age, you type a question into the computer and you get an answer right away. The originality of the expression of the wine is always evaluated at the competitions, the genius of the wine maker lies in the fact that he captures the environment for which he breeds the variety with a new variety. That was done. You have to be ahead of your time in order to express the desires and expectations of new generations of winemakers in the variety and then in the wine - in principle they do not change, but each decade has its own tastes, aromas and ways of consumption. All this must be taken into account when creating the variety and wine. Wine is the best way to see how the world is changing. 

How has it changed during your lifetime?

Ján Smrek once wrote a collection of poems called Galloping Horses. Those poems expressed the spirit and time of my youth, it was still the time of hoes and horses, even in the vineyards. There were stake vineyards everywhere in Rača. Since the times of German colonization, when German winegrowers came under the Lesser Carpathians, the cultivation of vineyards has not changed for several centuries. The support for the bush was an agate stake, the main working tool of the hoe, later the horse became an assistant. Until the middle of the 20th century, the vineyards resembled an endless spider web in squares planted with a truss winding around the vines. After that, everything changed radically, violently every decade, and rapid changes continue to this day. 

Don't the wines of the past speak of an extraordinary vineyard area that produces wine of exceptional quality regardless of the time?

Wine must really be judged in a wider context. The French prepared the Great Atlas of French vineyards, where they described all the wine-growing regions. Slovakia would also need something like this to appreciate its vineyards more. During my career, I was not only engaged in managerial work, but when we were establishing vineyards, I described in detail the parameters of the space and the vines we planted there in my doctoral thesis. Hon Krivé with Frankovka modrá, or Žajdlík, which produces excellent Tramín, are unique in many respects comparable to top French vineyards. The difference is that Slovakia and its governments have not been able to create the kind of social climate for wine in recent decades that it enjoys in France or neighboring Austria.