Aperol. Is there no end to it?

 

Wine in Denmark and a little bit of Sweden

 

 

Nobody should be surprised any more. Good wine is being produced in Denmark, Sweden and eve Norway. 

On a trip to the Danish Riviera last year (highly recommended) we looked for local produce of course. Maybe we should have gone further afield, to the Rosnaes Peninsular for example or to Jutland, Funen or Bornholm because like the Netherlands, native bottles aren't finding their way into shops let alone restaurants in any numbers. 

 

Time will tell. The EU officially recognised Denmark as a wine-producing country only in 2000. Despite our efforts, we only found one bottle of Danish wine for sale in Copenhagen.

 

That was in a nice wine shop in the Jagersborggade called Den Sidste Drabe.

  

Opposite by the way is an absolutely lovely natural wine and food shop called  Norrebro Kolonial. 

 

Running it was a very well informed lady called Mirian Jensen who has some winemaking experience herself. There were no Danish wines in stock however. 

So if you want to buy a bottle it sems you have to go to the winery. 

We did just that in Zealand. The Orby Vingaard is one of the nearest to Copenhagen. It was planted in 2007 by Soren Sondergaard and his wife. 

 

They have what is now quite often to be found; a restaurant and venue for parties and weddings. 

 Our phone call to Soren Sondergaard to make an appointment to visit the winery and hopefully buy a bottle or two was tricky in that we didn't have a language in common but we managed and at the appointed time, Soren was there to show us round and sell his wine.

 

 

We bought a 100% Bolero; something we had never tried before, a Rondo/Leon Millot and Bolero blend and a Solaris. 

 

After this, we were allowed to take a look at the vineyard. It is beautifully kept with not a blade of grass out of place.

Souvignier Gris

 

 

  

the ubiquitous Solaris

 

 

 

 

the rare Bolero

 

 

 

Rondo

 

 

The 

 

 

Varieties grown at Orby include Cabernet Cantor, Souvignier Gris and Pinot Noir.

The other Danish vineyard we would have liked to have seen was called Dyrehøj and is the largest in the country. It is on the Rosnaes Peninsula, also known as the Napa of Denmark. Their grape varieties are especially numerous;

Johanniter, Muscaris, Solaris and Souvignier Gris for the whites and Cabernet Cantor, Cabernet Cortis, Monarch, Pinot Noir and Regent for the reds.

Monarch is a true rarity. It is a cross between Merzling and Dornfelder and officially classed as a PIWI variety. Dyrehøj use it only to make a pink sparkling and still wine.

 

In North Zealand the most famous city is Elsinore, or Helsingor to be correct. From there it is only a matter of 20 minutes by ferry to be in Sweden (Helsingborg). We were totally excited to make this simple trip and can't imagine the bridge from Copenhagen to Malmo is any more thrilling. Although so close there is a complete change of atmosphere on landing in Sweden. Amazing really when you consider the shared history and now shared EU membership. On the other hand the money is different as well as the language of course.

 

 

So is the system for the sale of alcohol. In Sweden there is the famous monopoly, Systembolaget who have their own shops throughout the country. This works surprisingly well because Systembolaget is a great organisation and the shops are quite brilliant. 

 

On the search for Swedish wines this time we found more than one Solaris (of course), one of which is called Lotima Bridget, 

 

and a Rose from Cabernet Cortis - Lotima Roselyn. These two are from Lottenlund, a local vineyard but most Swedish wineries are further south. 

 

 

 

 

There were also Wines from the Kullaberg Vineyard described as 'A friendship wine with Austria.' The grapes are grown in Styria and vinified in Sweden. Here was a Souvignier Gris

 

 

and in this case a blend of the Styrian Souvignier Gris with Cabernet Noir grown at Kullabergs Vingard, Cape Kullaberg in southern Sweden. Why not?

At Copenhagen airport we were hoping for some more opportunities to buy Danish wine but as you see the choice was very limited; products from Andersen and Nordlund. Nordlund was Denmark's first commercial vineyard established near Copenhagen between 1999 and 2003. Their red grape is mainly Rondo and the white is Solaris. Andersen make sparkling fruit wines.

On the laft are also mostly fruit wines, one intriguingly from rhubarb. 

A magnificent obsession

 

There's not much that gives us greater pleasure than stories about rescuing plants from extinction. 

Normally we reserve these for wine grape varieties. We even started a Hall of Fame for those intrepid people who have found maybe a single vine thought to be extinct and propagated cuttings patiently over years (Thierry Navarre mentiones 20) to be able to plant a vineyard with them and produce wine. 

It really is like ressicitating a being though to have died. The world is richer as a result.

'Alles was vielfaeltig ist, ist schoen,' (everything diverse is beautiful) Karlheinz Stockhausen.

 On the plan of the property, there is written the following notice;

Huerto Botanico el Bartoli

El nucleo de la Fundacion es su coleccion de citros, que conforma el huerto Botanico el Bartoli. Este jardin unico cuenta con unas 500 variedades diferentes de citricos, cultivads en una extension aproximada de 4.5 hectareas.  

 

Bartoli Botanical Garden

The core of the Foundation is its collection of citrus, which makes up the Bartoli Botanical Garden. This unique garden has about 500 different varieties of citrus, cultivated over an area of approximately 4.5 hectares. 

list of donors to the foundation

The garden is now owned by Todoli Citrus Foundation of which Vicente is President. There is a long list of supporters. Being a foundation until recently, none of the fruit was sold commercially. Now the UK has become a market for certain produce which is sold to 200 restaurants here. Gradually others in Spain and elsewhere are becoming aware of the many culinary uses of  these fruits and are using them in restaurants also.

In these pages we have already departed from just wine grapes to report on the 'Children of extinct trees,' the gene bank of saplings at the gardens of Ninfa (Lazio) taken from in some cases the last examples of an Oak species in existance.  

 

This time we would like to pay tribute to the Todoli collection of some 500 species of citrus fruit at Palmera, (Valencia) Spain.

We already hailed Vicente ("I love all grapes") Todoli in a post here and indeed awarded him our Special Award for Diversity in 2023.

We hope we will be forgiven for reproducing what we wrote at that time, This makes for a very long post as we can now report on an actual visit to the Todoli Foundation:

Special Award for Diversity

 

Slotovino - a plea for diversity in Wine. That's our headline but strangely enough we have never given an award for Diversity itself. 

This year, quite by chance, nealy all our awards are for Spain - a country so obsessed with Tempranillo and in which Airen is the most planted variety - that their secrets remain hidden in a way that, say Italy's do not. 

So once again, and completely by happenstance, our new Diversity award goes to Vicente Todoli wose own biography is a very model of diversity.

Vicente Todoli, yes - he who was Chief Curator and Artistic Director of the Valencia Institute of Modern Art, founding director of the Serralves Museum in Porto and Director of the Tate Modern in London from 2003 - 2010. His career in art continues with the artistic directorship of the  HangarBicocca gallery in Milan, Trustee of the Fundacio per Amor a l'Art in Valencia and President of the Botin Foundation Visual Arts Advisory Committee and no doubt much else.

So what about wine? He is not involved in any aspect of the wine world and apart from his most distinguished accomplishments in the world of art and what follows, he may be unknown to Wine.

What follows is extraordinary. Through inheriting a family estate he found himself the owner of a citrus grove. A trip to a private collection near Perpignan of 80 varieties of citrus grown in pots gave him the idea of planting an orchard to preserve the genetic diversity and heritage of citrus fruit. 

 

There are now over 400 varieties grown at the Todoli Citrus Foundation at Palmira, Valencia where Vicente was born. Also a gastronomic laboratory, a library and of course a museum, an ethnobotanical museum. You don't see many of them but Vicente is the man to build one.

So now we can get the picture about diversity but what about a connection to grapes and wine? On a recent visit to London, we asked him that question. Here is his answer;

"I love all grapes"

 

Vicente leads the 2-hour tour, lecturing as we go

Our visit was only one of very many Vicente welcomes several times a week when he is not running his gallery in Milan, the Pirelli HangarBicocca. We arrived at 11.00 but he had already led another visit that day. 

The fruits are laid out in categories on tables

He shares his magnificent obsession with great seriousness abut also great joy. He introduces each species and guides you on your tasting.

down shaded avenues

enough for everyone to taste

each tree a different variety

Everything is arranged to give you a panorama of what the collection consists of. 

big ones, small ones, some as big as your head

Vicente knows every tree. He doesn't use chemical fertilisers, weedkillers or anything that is not natural and ecologically sound. Perhaps the most surtprising thing is that he doesn't prune the trees with the exception of some straggly low growth perhaps. He says he likes each tree to have its own shape and personality.

strange fruit

Those small brown ones look like dates.

 

the ramp leads to a viewing platform where you can see all 5 ha.

 There were no dead trees. All seemed to be in the best of health.

Paella alla Valenciana - no fish!

 

At the end we were treated to a magnificent lunch. It wasn't clear if all Vicente's tours end this way but it seemed that his colleagues were not cooking the meal for the first time. 

A slap-up meal.