The first thing we just have to tell you is that our new book won the prize as Best Wine Book for Professionals in Sweden by the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards! We just received the information a few days ago. We are so happy! In addition the book has also been nominated for to the [...]

This year’s most hectic wine travel season has come to an end. The very last of our autumn wine tours, to a Sicily with nice summer-ish weather, finished on Sunday. The only remaining travel on our schedule is a wine tasting tour to half a dozen places (in Sweden) for Britt and a trip to [...]

This is a very hectic period, both for wine producers and for us at BKWine. The harvest will be late in many wine districts this year. In some places they have started but many are still waiting. It has been a year with big variations. Up north (relatively speaking) it has been exceptionally cool. (But [...]

We are getting more and more excited. It is a certain nervousness or anxiety that is building up. Next week we will launch our new book! What will people say?! The book’s title is Wine and the Environment, Organic, Biodynamic, and Natural. And that is a pretty good summary of what it is about. Unfortunately [...]

BKWine Brief nr 107, July 2012 Five hectares is not much. But apparently that is the total planted acreage of the folle noire grape in France. The relative folle blanche is much more common. It is widely planted in the Cognac region. It is also grown in the Loire Valley under the name gros plant. [...]

In this brief we write about several wine competitions. One is very special, almost a curiosity: A competition to nominate the wine with the most successful (or best) malolactic fermentation. I wonder how you judge that. Is there something in a well made and balanced wine that indicates a particularly successful malolactic fermentation? Maybe. We [...]

Selling wine is not easy. Some (regions/producers) think it will be easier if they get their own appellation, as we mentioned in the last Brief: two new appellations in the Loire Valley that no one knows and that hardly will be significantly different from the existing appellations in the region. Others believe in different kinds [...]

The weather in April in France has been quite cold and rainy and the small buds that started growing during the warm days in March have been suffering night time frost in some parts on France, notably in Champagne, Burgundy and in the Loire valley. How big the damage will be is uncertain but according [...]

It seems that the wine world have been caught up a new insane craze or hysteria. This thing with “natural wines” Every wine magazine, wine journalist, wine blogger etc is writing about “natural wines”, either praising it as the only true wine or ridiculing it as a sham. Much that is written is interesting and [...]

Rebuilding a web site is exciting. There is always something new and unexpected that happens. Many of you have had some troubles accessing our site recently and we apologise for that. That is one of the adventures that we have had when we have redesigned our site. Or more accurately, completely changed our web presence. [...]

If last month was special because it was BKWine Brief issue number 100 this month’s Brief is special for another reason. We have discovered that there are some issues with the delivery of the Brief to some subscribers’ email addresses. This concerns primarily Yahoo and Hotmail addresses that seem to totally block the delivery of [...]

We are probably at least as surprised as anyone else. That we have reached number 100 of the BKWine Brief! It all started in May 2003. Well, it really started long before that if we talk about us and wine. Further down you will find a short look back on how it started and what [...]

Ninety nine and a half – November was quite simply not a good month to make issue one hundred. You will have to wait until December! We have just arrived home after 5 days in Apulia in southern Italy. We took part in an event called Apulia Wine Identity, initiated by 21 producers in the [...]

There are a lot of different things we would like to write about: why vintages no longer matter that much (or matter differently), why the classification systems are uninteresting, why the system with planting rights is only protectionist silliness, which our top new discoveries are in the Languedoc region, which are our favourites among the [...]

It is September, as often, the Brief will be slightly unusual… this is the time of year when we are constantly travelling. There are many good reasons to be travelling in the vineyards at this time of the year. For us in particular one good reason is that many of our tour clients want to [...]

BKWine Brief Issue 97, August 2011 This requires an explanation! Why are we late? This is the August newsletter and you should have received it around two weeks ago. You may have noticed that we have renovated our web site. We certainly hope that you have noticed! If not, take a look here: www.bkwine.com. But… [...]