What pleases you most when you find yourself around? / There is wine galore in Valčice to be found. Let’s stick together against all enemies and foes / ours is the place that by the name of Valčice goes! Clink the glasses lads, to hell with sadness, hey / god save Valčice and Moravian land, that’s what I say!

This is the route of the Mikulov wine trail, which takes you through Valtice and its environs. A former residence settlement of the Liechtenstein family and an important Moravian wine centre, and is the southernmost town and Moravia. A view from a colonnade at Rajstna offers an imposing panorama of the baroque monuments of Valtice and of the Lednice-Valtice Cultural Landscape, which was, thanks to its unique character, entered into the World Heritage list of UNESCO. The bishops of Pasov gained the settlement with vineyards at the end of the 12th century. Two centuries later, the Liechtenstein family purchased the domain and immediately improved its financial and economic position. Charles I and Charles Eusebius of Liechtenstein made Valtice into a residence town of the most powerful noble family in Moravia, and their descendants administered the town until 1945.

In addition to the historic land register of the Liechtenstein family from 1414, the Chateau cellar built in 1430 and the Cross cellar built in 1640, with a capacity of over a million litres of wine, testify to the extent of vineyards around Valtice. Nevertheless, the development of viticulture in the town did not rest exclusively in the hands of the aristocracy. In 1855, a local fellowship for agriculture and viticulture was established that was one of the biggest agricultural associations in Lower Austria. The fellowship played an important role in the promotion of wine from Valtice, which was rather difficult due to competition generated by other wines of Lower Austria. In 1873, a first viticulture school in the Czech lands was established in Valtice and the wine from the town began to compete successfully with Austrian wines. A general stagnation in viticulture by the end of the 19th century, which developed into a crisis before the First World War, was put to an end only when Valtice was incorporated into Czechoslovakia in 1920. An increasing interest in the production of wine encouraged the formation of a wine joint-stock company, Société Vinicole, in 1923, which took over management of the Cross cellar and concentrated on the production of sparkling wines. Out of almost twenty vine tracks located in the environs of the town, the following are the best known: Pod Rajstnou (Under Rajstna), U Křížového Sklepa (By the Cross Cellar), Šimle, Hindrtály, Knížecí Vyhlídka (Prince’s View), Culisty Dlúhé, Katzelsdorfské Pole (Katzelsdorf Field), Sonneberg. The current area of 582 hectares of registered vineyards, twenty wine producers and the wine facilities and equipment at the disposal of the town have made Valtice an important wine settlement even from a pan-European viewpoint. Valtice is the seat of the National Salon of Wines, the Wine academy, the Association of Moravian Winegrowers and the High School for Viticulture.  

The massive pressing houses and imposing winegrowers' houses that used to stand in the historical centre of the town mostly fell prey to devastating fires in the 18th and 19th centuries. Only a few winegrowers' houses have been preserved, the most valuable of them being a gabled house almost untouched by any reconstructions in Kopečná street n. 49 – it is one of the few houses the fires spared. The front of the pressing house is reinforced by four supporting pillars. Between these pillars, there is an entrance to the pressing house outfitted with stone jambs. The spacious pressing house is buried under the ground level and its floor is paved with burnt bricks. The rear wall of the pressing house contains two doors: one opens towards stairs leading to the living quarters. Behind the second door, there is a wooden staircase descending into the vaulted cellar with a well. The biggest cellar in Valtice is the Cross cellar of the joint-stock company Vinné Sklepy Valtice. This company uses the Chateau cellar for repining of red wines; the cellar also serves, together with the Town cellar, for excursions and wine tasting. The streets Vinařská, Sklepní, Josefská, Růžová and Polní contain more than 500 cellars used mainly by small producers of wine. Single-storey pressing houses are the most common ones and they are complemented by cellars with fronts with various architectural structures. Hundred-year-old cellars have fender walls of stone and vaults of burnt bricks. The oldest cellars have ceilings of chiselled limestone blocks.