Vintners With a Mission Bring Wine to Denmark

More famous for how much they eat than how well, Danes make few apologies for their preference for red meat, junk food and beer over the Mediterranean fare and fine wines favored elsewhere on the continent.

But a two-man crusade to elevate Danish gastronomy is gaining ground here--about seven acres, to be exact.

Jens Michael Gundersen and Torben Andreasen have delivered Denmark into the ranks of winemaking countries, albeit on a scale so small that even the notoriously protective French vintners have raised no objections.

DanskVinCenter is a small but booming business set up by the two viticulturists who overcame labyrinthine European Union regulations in their fight to change their country’s reputation from beer-guzzling gluttony to wine-sipping savoir-faire.

Their mission has brought about more than just the tiny vineyard that will produce this country’s first wine for commercial sale next year. VinCenter is also a fount of wine knowledge tucked behind a small business park on the southern fringes of this capital city.

A leafy courtyard is the setting for wine education seminars, and an adjacent kitchen is a training site for cooks and sommeliers. Almost daily, workers on company picnics or busloads of tourists gather around wooden tables to taste imported wines, or some of the experimental varieties the men will soon bring to market.

The company also organizes group vacations for Danish wine lovers to countries with more established product, including to the emerging wine powers of Australia, Chile and South Africa.

That Danes are increasingly wine savvy is clear from the growing number of restaurants stocking cellars with the world’s best bottles and the population’s growing thirst. Per capita wine consumption has doubled during the past two decades, to about 40 bottles a year, at the same time that beer sales have dropped 20%. Although the country still consumes three times as much beer by volume as wine, the gap has been steadily narrowing.

“Go into any bookstore in Denmark, and you find two meters [about two yards] of shelf space filled with books about wine,” says Gundersen, who has contributed to the literary wealth with his own coffee table publication. “We have this reputation of being barbarians from the north who drink only beer and schnapps, but many people are becoming more discriminating in their tastes.”

About 5,000 bottles will be brought onto the market next year, mostly a hearty red Rondo varietal whose richness is due in part to the heavy local soil, Gundersen says. He hopes to eventually boost output to about 10,000 bottles, to be sold to high-end restaurants and to connoisseurs via the Internet.

As small as the company is, VinCenter still had to fight to be allowed to produce wine at all. Because it was not a winemaking country when it entered the European Union in 1973, Denmark was prohibited under the bloc’s agricultural laws to add to the veritable ocean of wine already flooding Europe.

A Danish member of the European Parliament, Karin Ress Jorgensen, took up the viticulturists’ cause in the mid-1990s, battling the Brussels bureaucracy until EU Agriculture Commissioner Franz Fischler relented. Danish wine was licensed for export a year ago, and about 15 small producers have registered alongside the VinCenter duo to make their own tiny contributions to the country’s wine debut.

“Before the reform, it was difficult for nontraditional wine-producing countries to come on the European market. With this decision, we made it simpler,” says Johan Reyniers, Fischler’s spokesman. “It doesn’t apply only to Denmark but to any small new producer.”

The newcomers aren’t allowed to include the year or the grape type on their labels, nor can they make the quality claim of appellation controlee, Reyniers says of the conditions demanded by the EU’s leading wine producers--France, Italy, Germany and Spain.

“The EU didn’t really object, because they knew we would never become a threat to the others,” Gundersen says. “But it’s been an interesting lesson for the skeptical Danes. Everyone worries that you can’t do anything with these people in Brussels, but in fact even a small country like Denmark can make itself heard.”

Gundersen has been making wine as a hobby for 15 years and has experimented with 150 grape varieties. He planted his grapes for the first commercial harvest a year ahead of the EU authorization, speculating on approval and eager to get moving on the three-year effort to develop the fruit.

Even when his vineyard is up to full production later this decade, the wine pioneer acknowledges, he’s unlikely to get rich from his investment. But he thinks that at least one of his wines, the full-bodied Rondo, could be a commercial success.

“Being small can be an advantage, if you can market your product for its exclusivity,” the vintner says. “There are places in California that produce only 2,000 bottles a year, and people line up to buy it.”

Winemaking in Denmark will always be a niche industry, he acknowledges, noting the limited land suitable for growing grapes and the harsh northern climate.

“Financially, it will never be important,” he says. “But to us it is, because of its cultural impact. We think Denmark is a more interesting place to live now.”