Making wine in the Nordic countries is far from the glamor associated with Europe’s famed wine chateaus: The sun is fickle, the season is short and diehard aficionados work up more sweat than wine, but climate change is helping boost harvests.
Worlds away from the 1,000-year-old vineyards of continental Europe, winemaker Murre Sofrakis inspects his vines on a late summer’s day, his eyes intently focused on the ripening grapes as he strolls along.
The 51-year-old strapping Swede with craggy Mediterranean looks owns a 2 hectare vineyard in Sweden’s southern Skane Province and is one of the country’s biggest winemakers.
Photo: AFP
When he started out in 2001, he produced 100 liters made from 17 different varieties of grapes.
“It takes time in the beginning before you find the right kinds. You have to learn how to grow [them], we don’t have those traditions here,” he said.
Sofrakis now runs two properties: his own, called Klagshamn, which he manages with his wife and two employees, and another one called Fladie, where he is the winegrower.
He turns out a total of 20,000 bottles per year, almost one-third of Sweden’s total wine production.
However, that is just a drop in the bucket worldwide. In Sweden, only 100 hectares of land are used for vineyards, compared with 750,000 in France.
The money also cannot compare to that made by winemakers in Bordeaux, Napa Valley or the Andes.
Swedish winemakers’ average revenue in 2016 amounted to 600,000 kronor (US$61,260), Federation of Swedish Farmers data showed.
At Fladie, Sofrakis can count on about 100 volunteers to help him out in their free time.
On this day at the tail end of summer, two pensioners prune the vines to better expose the grapes to the sun before the harvest.
Nordic winegrowers are self-taught amateurs for the most part, but lately they have begun recruiting experts, often from abroad. Sofrakis has hired 31-year-old Chinese enologist Ding Jixing as his master winemaker to help him make a better product.
Nordic vineyards primarily produce a white wine made from Solaris, a German hybrid grape that holds up well in the cold climate, where the grapes have only a short time to ripen.
Solaris is “very easy to grow in terms of robustness to diseases. It’s relatively vigorous,” University of Copenhagen professor and cold climate winegrowing expert Torben Andersen told reporters.
Despite the difficult conditions, wine-growing is expanding in the region.
The trend is “not due to climate change, but to new types of grapes” that do not need high temperatures to ripen, said Sveneric Svensson, head of the Swedish Winegrowers’ Association.
However, rising temperatures have led to better harvests.
An increase of “1° in a century, it’s helping... We see changes that make it easier and more fun,” Andersen said.
Last year, summer was unusually hot, yielding an exceptionally large vintage.
In Sweden, about 30 winegrowers sell their wines, while there are just less than 100 in their southern neighbor, Denmark.
Only one vineyard in the Nordic region holds the protected designation of origin, Europe’s badge of quality for a special product rooted in its region: the Dons vineyard in Denmark.
While many Nordic winegrowers claim to produce organic wines, few are actually able to stick an official “organic” label on their bottles, as the administrative process is considered too painstaking and expensive.
“Everything is done by hand, we use no chemicals, we only use organically approved materials,” Sofrakis said.
“In Sweden [and Denmark] it’s forbidden to use copper,” which is used elsewhere to combat mildew, but is increasingly controversial because of the toxicity it releases into the soil, he said.
Nordic wines are mainly sold locally. While Danish winemakers are allowed to sell their product at their vineyards, that is not allowed in Sweden and Finland, where state-run monopolies are the only ones allowed to sell alcohol.
So how does it taste, this wine hailing from lands more known for beer and aquavit?
“Ninety-five percent of people who taste test it [Swedish wine] blindly think it has a good bouquet and that it tastes very good,” sommelier Mattias Safvenberg said.
Andrew Reynolds, viticulture professor at Canada’s Brock University, said that “the quality is already more than acceptable and will improve with time and with the introduction of other varieties.”
However, Swedish wines are not ready to take over the world just yet — unlike the country’s sommeliers, who regularly place at the top in international competitions, such as Jon Arvid Rosengren, who was named the world’s best sommelier in 2016.
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