Welcome to the BKWine Brief nr 93, April 2011

Our new site on wine travel is now up and running. All information about our wine tour activity will in the future be found on www.bkwinetours.com. Our wine tour programs will of course be published there (take a look at Bordeaux and Burgundy!), but we will also publish a lot of other travel-related information on that site. First we have a “Travelog”, or travel blog, that talks about things that happen on our wine tours, visits we do, people we meet etc. But it will also talk about other things that have to do with wine travel. On that site there will also be various other “useful” information, for example city guided to some of the places that we visit on our wine tours (e.g. Beaune in Burgundy), or short introduction to the wine regions that we travel to. You can find all that under the menu ‘resources’.

If you want to be up to date on what we do on the travel side it is a good idea to subscribe to the RSS feed for www.bkwinetours.com, or specifically to the RSS feed for the travelog.

(There will be quite a lot of talk about travel in this Brief and elsewhere – as you can imagine, we have been quite immersed in travel things having launched our two new sites (one in Swedish too) and also finalising this autumn’s program.)

The wine travel season has now started in full speed. You can for example read more on Istrian wines in this Brief – we were in Croatia not very long ago.

We have also been to Champagne, Chablis and Burgundy (our “Three Classics” tour). We enjoyed a weather that was almost like summer and we visited several interesting producers – and tasted many wines. And then we went to northern Italy, both to Piedmont (amazing how many different styles of Barolo and nebbiolo wines there are!), to Soave and to Valpolicella. Interesting mix!

At this time of the year the activity is low in the winery but in the vineyards things are very busy. Buds are bursting so that you can almost hear a pop-pop-pop among the vines. And soon you have leaves and tendrils everywhere. Apparently, a vine can grow 20 or 30 centimetres per day when it is as most vigorous. This time of the year is really a wonderful time to come out into the vineyards: there are different shades of pale green everywhere, fruit trees are blooming and even between the vines you often see flowers. These days growers often let the grass and other plants grow between the vines so you can sometimes get amazingly colourful patterns in the vineyards. Another big advantage of travelling at this time of the year is the long and bright evenings!

Weather has been excellent (amazing!) in many parts of Europe so far this spring. In Paris we have had two weeks of summer weather – with lunches on the balcony. Some wine growers tell us that the growing season is two weeks ahead of normal. One producer said pragmatically “well, we just have to adapt”. How true. However, in some wine districts it has not been so fun: in Sauternes they had hail. How much damage it has done, or if the vines will be able to recover, we don’t know. We will have to wait and see – just like always with wine.

Britt & Per

PS: Recommend to your friends to read the Brief or forward it to them ! More on wine:
Guest writers on BKWine.com
Wine videos: BKWine TV
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