From filmmaking to winemaking: saving Prague's oldest vineyard

Former filmmaker Jaroslav Hykl made a radical career change at 44: instead of shooting films and television programmes, he turned to winemaking and revived a derelict vineyard right beneath the walls of Prague Castle, pouring hundreds of millions of crowns of his own money and loans into the project.

Before that, Hykl had worked with the renowned directors Otakar Vávra and Jiří Menzel, and later spent years filming the Czech Television series “Travelling for Wine”, which took him all over the world and brought him into contact with people across the wine industry. The experience inspired him to create a vineyard of his own — and in 2005 he won a state tender for a long-term lease of the St. Wenceslas Vineyard and the neoclassical Richter Villa near the Castle.

The site was in a dire state: an overgrown plot, homeless people living in the building, a leaking roof and collapsed ceilings. The lease required him to restore the property at his own expense — Hykl had to take out a loan worth hundreds of millions of crowns and turn to his family for help. The heritage authorities’ requirement to build underground technical infrastructure inside the rock alone added a further 30 million crowns.

For the villa’s restoration, the entrepreneur worked with the renowned architectural studio D3A, combining the building’s historic appearance with contemporary Czech design and craftsmanship — including large-format wallpaper by a UMPRUM graduate and an 11-metre chandelier shaped like a grapevine, created together with the Bejvl family of designers.

Villa Richter opened in 2008 — just days before the collapse of Lehman Brothers, which triggered the financial crisis and seriously complicated repaying the loan. The business was later hit by the COVID-19 pandemic too, forcing him to lay off part of the staff and take out a new loan. Today Hykl admits that, knowing all this in advance, he would not have taken on such a project a second time — winemaking alone could never pay for itself without the accompanying gastronomy and tourism.