Can Belgian wine become as famous as Belgian beer?

It is necessary, of course, to be wary of mentioning the national stereotypes, but these observations were volunteers jointly by a Belgian and a Dutch while we taste wine in Belgium together near the Dutch border: the Belgians have a very different approach to the Dutch. They like to go out and spend. In a restaurant, they will probably start with champagne, while the Dutch are quite stingy and are more likely to go for the wine of the house.

In the wine world, Belgians have long enjoyed a high connoisseur reputation. For years at the beginning of the 20th century, Belgium imported many more smart wines from Bordeaux, the classified wines, than any other country, including the United Kingdom and the United States. The Belgians were also the first to identify that Pomerol was really a rather glorious drink when the Tent British still rejected Petrus, now the most expensive wine in Bordeaux, as an obscure country.

But today, Belgian wine drinkers are increasingly exposed to wines produced in their own country. During the tasting mentioned above, the Belgian wine writer and ex-publisher of the Belgian wine magazine, Dirk Rodriguez, called me a history of wine from his country in the modern era. He started with a handful of pioneers in the 1960s, followed by a second wave in the 1990s, producers who are still in business. Another cover of Belgian winegrowers emerged during the first years of this century and now, according to Rodriguez, “not a month has passed without a new area when seeing the light”.

The Belgian Wine-Growers association already has more than 200 members and regularly participates in the main European wine trade fairs in Paris and Düsseldorf. Many members have previously developed other fruits, especially apples. The vineyards can be found in a large part of the country, with the exception of the extreme south-east, which is simply too wet. The largest concentration of vineyards is located between Brussels and Maastricht above the Dutch border (a pretty town which, she assured me, is more Belgian than Dutch, as evidenced by the number of people drinking in outdoor cafes at the end of the afternoon of March there).

The total area of ​​Belgian vineyards is less than 1,000 ha, therefore less than a quarter of the extent of viticulture in Great Britain but more than most other countries in northern European. Poland has roughly the same total area under vineyard, but many more individual producers, suggesting that the average Belgian wine producer is more viable commercially than its Polish counterpart.

My Belgian wine tasting took place in a very emerging Belgian cellar. Eburon Estate has only 1.5 ha of vines at the moment, and a small cellar with only a dozen barrels and six small reservoirs of fermentation, but it could not be blamed for the ambition, nor the quality of its wines, even if for the moment, it is only a part -time occupation for its owners.

Paul Molleman and Marco Tiggelman work together as a full -time employee of California Wine Institute in The Hague. Just before my tasting, Tiggelman had fled from the promotion of California wine in Africa as part of the American agriculture campaign. It has a long history of generic promotion of wine, working first for the famous Hazel Murphy, who did so much to present Australian wine in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, then promote wines from corners of Eastern Europe as Moldova and Northern Macedonia.

But he had always wanted to make wine himself and started with a brand called Bucket, provided by grapes from the south of France and Eastern Europe. A complicated story involving several divorces and an old flame saw him take up a small vineyard rather neglected in 2023, with Molleman investing in a new cellar for that. It had been planted in 2015 near the village of Vreren, just south of the oldest city in Belgium, Tongreren.

Since then, during his free time, he and his partner Flore Engels have fellowly restored the healthy vineyard and converted the rather beautiful Flemish stables on the property into a bed and breakfast and housing.

Other distinctive brands include their 10 miniature weeping sheep, the work of which consists in fertilizing the vineyard and keeping the coverage crops under control. Their Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, the Auxerrois and the recently planted Syrah vines benefit from a slight slope, but not abrupt enough to protect them from the most unusual and catastrophic frost of Belgian viticulture, which reduced the country's total harvest by more than three million liters in 2023 to just over a million in 2024. bigger start for an embryonic company.

With the exception of unpredictable frosts, low temperatures are no longer a problem for Belgian winegrowers. Summer days can now reach 30 ° C or more. Wines of 13.5% alcohol are common. The greatest danger is humidity. The average annual precipitation is 900 mm in a large part of the Belgian wine country, more than ideal. “(Vine) Control of diseases is a problem,” admitted Tiggelman, stressing that Belgians, with their long love for French wine made from the species of European vitis vinifera vine, are much less enthusiastic about hybrid varieties resistant to diseases than disease resistant to diseases.

That said, Belgians love sparkling wine very much and, on the basis of my tasting, I would say that Belgian grapes, like their English counterparts, are well suited to the production of petile, thanks to their relatively high acidity. (A large part of the Underripe 2024 was sparkling.) I appreciated the answers to the Champagne not only by Eburon, but by Schorpion, the Deux-Montes and the Genoels-Elderen well established.

The Belgian Chardonnay impressed me for the first time since 2007 when, in the smart Flemish restaurant HOF van Cleve, the sommelier served me and another OPLEEUW BLIND OPLEUW wine master and we took it for a show by Puligny. Since then, I have appreciated examples of the new company La Falize, advised by the owner of the tiny, closed of OpelEuw, Peter Colemont, and of CH de Bousval, whose refined Chardonnays are imported into the United Kingdom by Haynes Hanson & Clark.

My tasting of a dozen Belgian wines sorted on the shutter by Rodriguez and Tiggelman also included three Pinot Blacks. I particularly liked the purity and freshness of the Eburon 2023, which have not showed an obvious oak – completely a feat since, to perform, this first vintage had been matured in new barrels. On the other hand, the 2018 Vogelsanck of the established property Genoels-Elderen, based in castle, seemed a bit highly, but this is probably not true for younger examples.

However, one of the Belgian wines that I recently appreciated, however, was a completely mature 2017 riesling in Aldeneyck, which I had been given to bring back to London. Served alongside a much younger Dutch riesling of the as well established apostelhoeve, cultivated just above the border, it went particularly well with friends loving wine, including a Belgian and someone who had worked for several years in Hague.

The number of Belgian vineyards increased by 11% in 2024. Be careful, in England.

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