The Lawyer Who at 40 Went Back to Mikulov and Built a Wine Paradise Called Fučík

Prague lawyer Petr Fučík has spent over a decade successfully balancing his legal career at a leading Prague firm with running his own winery in South Moravia — Vinařství Fučík, which has been racking up international awards and recognition from wine connoisseurs. At 40, rather than buying a villa in Spain to retire to, he decided to return to his hometown of Mikulov and build a business from the ground up.

As a child, Fučík hated helping his father tend the family vineyard — so after finishing school in Mikulov, he moved to Brno to study law and history, and any dreams of travel quickly gave way to a job at Petr Kellner's investment group PPF, where he spent about three years. Later he met lawyer Petr Pečený, and together with him and former Interior Minister Ivan Langer, he co-founded the law firm Pečený, Fučík, Langer, which handles everything from criminal law to GDPR cases.

But over time, the "wine poetry" of his native Mikulov began to pull at him: Fučík started introducing friends to local wines and diving deeper into the subject himself. At 40, mulling over where to put his money and energy, he realized a villa in Spain held no appeal for him. His father was just about to retire, and Fučík decided to move back to Mikulov — not to carry on the modest family business as before, but to build a full-fledged winery with hired staff, all while keeping up his legal practice.

Today Fučík is 52, and he insists that law has become a kind of retreat from the unpredictable world of winemaking. "Legal documents follow an established form and rules you have to stick to. Winemaking, on the other hand, is a constant whirlwind where something always goes differently than you hoped," he laughs. So today his name carries real weight in both the legal and wine worlds — and in neither is he anywhere near the bottom of the pack.