The first Czech owner of this wine cellar was Mr. Bohuslav Minařík Sr. from 1945, who produced wine there until his death, i.e. until 2001, when he died at the age of 76. The cellar corridor was originally longer than 120 m, but around 1970 it was artificially covered with imported sand due to fears of a landslide. Due to defects in the sewer lines above the corridors, waterlogging occurred in these places, and in one case a corridor collapsed in the immediate vicinity. Fortunately, no one was inside at the time, but all the wine, including the prized archive, was gone.
That is why today the main cellar corridor is only 25 m long. We bought the cellar from Mr. Bohuslav Minařík Jr. - son in 2007. Mr. Bohuslav Minařík sr. served in Dobšice with German farmers - Franz and Anna Scheiber at no. 78 as groomsman. The elderly couple did not collaborate with the Germans and were not necessarily subject to Beneš's decrees - deportation, but they felt themselves to be Germans and so they left then. The young butler applied for the allocation of the building, fields and wine cellar, which were left to them by the National Administration at the time, and was successful.
At the time of the establishment of JZD, every owner of fields was forced to join them, including family members. Mr. Minařík st. he wanted to give his sons the opportunity to learn, for example, another trade, so he changed his house to a house to which the fields did not belong, thus avoiding this cooperative obligation. But he kept the cellar because he and winemaking – it was love at first sight. This great love lasted him throughout the rest of his life.
For the sake of interest, we mention that the cellar next door (closer to the main road) belonged to the old-set Požár family from No. 75 and the grandmother of the current owner of this wine cellar, Mrs. Marie Požárová, sold it in the 1970s for CZK 3,000, because all her land, incl. the vineyard was managed by the then JZD Rozkvět and therefore wine was not grown in the family.
As mentions of the settlement of Dobšice date back to the 12th century, we have good reason to believe that the history of building cellars goes back about 400-500 years, maybe even more. In some wine cellars in the vicinity, massive original large wine presses made of solid wood have been preserved, there are 5 of them in Dobšice today - in 2008. The rest was destroyed by the owners of the cellars, because today's more modern presses take up much less space. The largest preserved press in Dobšice is a press with a 9m long arm with a beam size of 57x57 cm and the year 1739 is carved on it.
This one is located in the basement opposite today's Švajka Forge. It can be assumed that such an investment could be afforded only by a winemaker who has been making wine for a considerable time or who was already an up-and-coming generation of winemakers, and that the cellar corridor for storing his products existed long before the purchase or production of such a giant press. The local inhabitants were Germans and Czechs, while the majority of the inhabitants of Dobšice in the pre-war period were Germans. These two national groups had no problems with each other until the arrival of the Nazis, and they often helped each other in digging tunnels.
Digging the tunnels was done mainly in the winter months when there was no work in the fields. Cellars in our area vary greatly. Some are only 2.5 m wide, 2.2 m high and even 200 m long, others with many side niches and corridors. Another type of cellar is 5m wide with a height of up to 5m, but these cellars are usually not that long. But they have one thing in common, they are dug by hand (rather scraped with classic hoes) in the sandstone massif. According to eyewitnesses, some cellars are connected for the purpose of protection against war raids, before the war there were no such connections.
Today, these passages from one cellar to another are walled off. The surviving oral reports say that the high-quality sandstone material obtained during the excavation of the corridors was exported from our area as far as Vienna, where it was used for the stucco of wealthy owners of houses, palaces and other important buildings. Wine cellars and especially wine tasting were widely used by weekend trippers from Znojmo. Local small winemakers opened their cellars on nice days, set up a few tables outside and offered their wine to tourists.
The largest winemaker in Dobšík before the Second World War was the Czech-German Andrle family, who bought their harvest from other smaller winemakers. They only kept the wine for their own consumption and usually no one traded with it. The wine cellar of the Andrle family is still standing today and is the renovated seat of Vinařství Hort in our cellar alley. This family, originating from Hrotovice, also owned the now defunct U Černého medvéda hotel on TGM square in Znojmo.
The original inhabitants of Dobšice also used the produced wine juice to mix a drink called "spritz" or "legrák" - today it is called "vinný sprik" - i.e. wine mixed with water.* This drink was drunk while working in the fields, because it suppressed the feeling of thirst and on the hottest days and even the so-called failed wine was sufficient for this drink.
In today's wine jargon, the word "légr" refers to sediment (sludge) that forms during self-cleaning of wine at the bottom of barrels, and this is poured out nowadays.
After the expulsion of the Germans from the Sudetenland, i.e. also from Dobšice, there were enough wine cellars without an owner who had to leave all the wine there. Back then, parties of guys were formed that raided those cellars whose owners were known to have been removed. So that's where the term "drink the cellar" comes from.
