19 hours ago
My boutique wine tour — Scandinavian style
Basking in the midsummer sunshine, Daniella Lundh Egenas stands among the terraces of Thora Vinegard, which roll down to the inky blue sea in the distance. 'This is potato land,' she says, gesturing around to neighbouring farmland on the Bjare peninsula. 'We get a lot of people driving up to ask if we sell potatoes. They get a bit of a surprise when we tell them it's actually wine.'
In the southernmost Swedish region of Skane there's a new crop getting farmers excited: grapes. While each summer southern Europe bakes in record-breaking heatwaves that blister fields and devastate harvests, the wine scene in Sweden — which started as a niche movement in the 1990s — is quietly flourishing. At the Swedish Wine Tasting event last year, 12 local tipples went up against 12 from elsewhere in Europe — including England, France and Italy — in a blind tasting judged by 18 international tasters. The winner? A 2021 sparkling wine from Kullabergs Vingard — one of Skane's very own.
With this new wine country comes a new tourism model. Previously bottles of alcohol were available to buy in Sweden only via state-run Systembolaget stores, but as of June 1 microbreweries and vineyards can sell bottles directly to customers, thanks to the overturning of a century-old law. One week after this change I head to the country's west coast with my sister, Claire (who had jumped at the chance to to be driven around wineries by me for four days), to raise a glass and tour the region that hopes to one day give Champagne a run for its money.
Our first stop is Astad Vingard in Varberg, about two hours' drive north of Malmo. We pass wildflower meadows filled with lupins, grazing Friesians and perfectly symmetrical Falu barns painted in distinctive rust red. The farm here produced organic milk until 2010, when it pivoted to wine and now has ten acres of vines.
Astad has been run by the Carlsson family for three generations, since 1946. Claes Bartoldsson heads the winemaking on the estate, having worked with the family for 17 years. 'We always have a shovel in the ground,' he says, showing me the new winery to be completed next month where guests will be able to book tastings and vineyard tours. He explains that Astad produces 20,000 bottles of sparkling wine a year, but in the next seven years capacity will increase to 200,000. 'People drink a lot of wine here, we're not making enough,' he says.
Swedish wine is a brand new terroir, Bartoldsson says. 'In Burgundy they have their styles for chardonnay, they have their styles for pinot and they only need to do the best version of that. There's no place for experimentation: there's a set style, a set goal, and that's it; whereas in Sweden there are no rules — that's what makes it exciting.'
The temperature in winter can fall to minus 25C here, so Swedish wine mainly comprises the solaris grape, which is often grown in cold climates to make still and sparkling white wine because it is hardy in frost and disease-resistant. 'You really need to love acidity to understand these wines,' Bartoldsson says as we sip his namesake cuvée, the Ang x Claes, which I can imagine enjoying on a long summer day (£65).
Despite it being delicious, wine isn't (yet) the main draw at Astad. Most visitors come here either for the Michelin-starred restaurant Ang — which is part-giant greenhouse, part-contemporary art installation and serves a 20-course menu of dishes including white asparagus with lemon verbena and deep-sea Norwegian shrimp — or the spa, a sprawling Disneyland of lily-pad-strewn swimming lakes and eight saunas, including one at the edge of a lake with its windows below the water line.
The showstoppers, though, are the 28 villas that stand around a swimming pond. My sister and I have great fun cold-plunging straight from the sauna in our rooms and gliding alongside the ducks until the midnight sun sinks beneath the horizon (room-only doubles from £271;
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Reluctant to leave Astad but eager to taste more Swedish wine we drive an hour south to the Thora Vingard. Egenas explains that the warm sea air here acts as a buffer against winter cold snaps, and the soil is sandy and rich in limestone such as that of Burgundy and Champagne. Visitors can dine at the newly opened Flora restaurant, which serves Bjare chicken with cauliflower and rhubarb and white chocolate yoghurt with strawberries and camomile meringue, and has a window overlooking the winery (mains from £22, tour and tasting from £30;
Egenas explains that there is heavy investment in winemaking in the region. Each vineyard I visit has a restaurant, hotel or bar attached — many of which are brand new. Egenas says that unlike in Denmark, where vineyards have long been able to sell bottles directly to visitors or in shops, Swedish wines have to work harder to compete with other European wines in restaurants, so taste better as a result. 'We need to have good quality wines to compete on a menu.' she says.
We spend a morning at the dramatic rocky outcrop of Hovs Hallar Nature Reserve, where the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman shot the opening scenes of The Seventh Seal, in which a knight plays chess with Death.
The west coast is home to many pretty fishing villages, such as Torekov, where there are clusters of cafés and fish restaurants by the port, and Varehog, where lunch at the excellent Bjare Fisk & Skaldjur might consist of whole turbot and pickles (mains from £12;
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The Bjare peninsula's reputation as a 'potato land' certainly does it a disservice, as this is where Swedes snap up summer homes. The village of Bastad has some seriously swish yachts in the marina, and we check in to the historic Hotel Skansen, where Ludvig Nobel — Alfred's nephew — built a clay tennis court in 1907 that now hosts the Nordea Open on the ATP Tour. But the highlights for us are a morning dip at the wooden bathhouse and watching the sun set from the rooftop infinity pool and a colony of seals lolling on the rocks (B&B doubles from £206;
In the afternoon we pop into Vejby Vingard, run by the eccentric, beret-wearing Jeppe Appelin, who has constructed Georgian-style wine cellar, complete with choral music. He makes smooth, organic orange wine in qvevris — 10ft-high, egg-shaped earthenware vessels that each weigh a ton — and at the courtyard bar a glass can easily lead to three, so you might have to book a taxi (tour and tasting from £46; 'Here in Sweden we don't have a wine culture,' Appelin says. 'We need to invent one.'
Appelin tells me that despite the economic downturn in Sweden, farmers on Bjare — some of whom have owned their land for generations — are reluctant to sell and make room for new vineyards. 'They want me to grow potatoes,' he says. 'Suddenly I'm a threat to their history, their culture, their future.' Appelin has erected a billboard as you drive onto the Bjare peninsula proclaiming: 'Welcome to Bjare wine country.' You can understand why it might have ruffled some feathers.
Our final stop is another hour's drive away, on the spectacular Kullaberg peninsula, where we are staying stay at the family-run Villa Brunnby (B&B doubles from £155; We spend a morning hiking the Kullaberg Nature Reserve, dipping into pebble bays for a swim in the sea. Lunch is on a terrace overlooking the sea at the idyllic Ransvik restaurant, near the town of Molle — a summery herring with salt-boiled beets and dill potatoes (mains from £14; Molle became notorious in the late 1800s for being the only place in Europe where men and women bathed together, in distinctive striped swimming costumes, in what was referred to as 'the sin of Molle'.
A ten-minute drive down away is the Kullabergs Vingard, where the staff are still recovering from the party they threw on the day that the new law came into effect, when 200 people turned up to buy £16 bottles. The law still has some stipulations: visitors must take a 30-minute tour of the vineyard and cannot buy any more than four bottles each (tour and tasting from £34). There's also a wine bar in a pretty greenhouse and a restaurant with views of the vines that serves simple food such as rillettes, cheese and charcuterie to complement the wine (dishes from £7;
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'This could be a revolution for the region,' Viktor Dahl, the chief executive of Kullabergs, says of the vineyard as we sip the aromatic, award-winning 2021 Immelen in its new shop. 'It's going to be the start of a big change in tourism.'
Sweden may have only a fledgling wine scene, but the green shoots are there. As champagne houses muscle in on land in Kent and East Sussex and English sparkling wine scoops up international awards, many Swedish winemakers are looking on with a dash of envy — and excitement. 'We look up to England a lot — what they have done there with wine is a very recent success story,' Egenas says. 'I think there are a lot of things that we can do the same, but we are still about 20 years behind.'
I'm keeping hold of the few bottles that I took home in my suitcase — they may be worth a bit one day. Katie Gatens was a guest of Visit Sweden ( Fly to Copenhagen then take a train to Malmo (from £13;
