Can Belgian wine be as famous as Belgian beer?

One should, of course, be careful to mention national stereotypes, but these observations were voluntary jointly by a Belgian and a Dutch as we tried wine together in Belgium near the Dutch border: the Belgians have a very different approach to the Dutch. They love to leave and spend. In a restaurant they will probably start with a little champagne, while the Dutch are quite innocent and they are more likely to go for the wine of the house.

In the wine world, the Belgians have long enjoyed a high reputation of knowledge. For years at the beginning of the 20th century, Belgium imported much more of Bordeaux intelligent wines, the Classes Crus, than any other country, including the United Kingdom and the United States. The Belgians were also the first to detect that Pomerol was really a rather glorious drink when the tense British still rejected Petrus, now the most expensive wine in Bordeaux, like a dark country ferment.

But today, Belgian wine drinkers are increasingly exposed to wines produced in their own country. To the tasting mentioned above, the writer of Belgian wines and former editor of Belgium’s Wines Magazine, Dirk Rodríguez, invited me to a history of his country’s wine in the modern era. He began with a handful of pioneers in the 1960s, followed by a second wave in the 1990s, producers that are still in business. Another clutch of Belgian watches emerged in the first years of this century and now, according to Rodríguez, “a month has not passed without a new domain seeing the light.”

The Belgian Vinistros Association already has more than 200 members and participates regularly in the main European wines fairs in Paris and Düsseldorf. Many of the members previously grew other fruits, particularly apples. The vineyards can be found in much of the country, except at the southeast end, which is too humid. The greatest concentration of vineyards is between Brussels and Maastricht on the Dutch border (a beautiful city that was sure, is more Belgian than Dutch, as evidenced by the number of people who drank in outdoor coffees at the end of March, I spent there).

The total area of ​​the Belgian vineyards is less than 1,000ha, so that less than a quarter of the range of viticulture in Britain, but more than most other countries in northern Europe. Poland has approximately the same total area under Vine but much more individual producers, which suggests that the average Belgian wine producer is more commercially viable than his Polish counterpart.

My tasting of Belgian wines took place in a very nascent Belgian winery. Eburon Estate has only 1.5ha of vines at this time, and a small winery with only a dozen barrels and six small fermentation tanks, but could not be criticized by ambition, or the quality of its wines, even if for now it is only a part -time occupation for its owners.

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

But he had always wanted to make wine himself and began with a brand called Bucket, supplied by grapes from southern France and Eastern Europe. A complicated story that involved several divorces and an old flame saw him take care of a small and quite careless vineyard in 2023, with Molleman investing in a new winery for it. It had been planted in 2015 near the town of Vreren, just south of the oldest city in Belgium, Tongaren.

Since then, in his spare time, he and his partner Flore Engels have been feverishly restoring the vineyard to health and turning the final slopes of the barns into the property into a bed, breakfast and housing.

Other distinctive brands include their 10 oamessant sheep, whose work is to fertilize the vineyard and maintain coverage crops under control. Their Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Auxerrois and recently plant Syrah Vines benefit from a slight slope, but not a steep enough to protect them from the most unusual and catastrophic Frost of the Belgian viticulture, which reduced the total harvest of the country to more than three million liters in 2023 to only more than one million in 2024. Eburon was reduced from 4.4 million liters to 400. 600 kg in the same period, it is not the best start for an embryonic business.

With the exception of unpredictable frosts, low temperatures are no longer a problem for Belgian vineyards. Summer days can now reach 30 ° C or more. 13.5 percent alcohol wines are common. The greatest danger is humidity. The average annual rain is 900 mm in much of Belgium’s wine country, more than ideal. “[Vine] The control of the disease is a problem, ”admitted Tiggelman, noting that the Belgians, with his long love for the French wine made of the species of European vines, Vitis vinifera, are much less enthusiastic about the hybrid varieties resistant to diseases that are the case in the Netherlands, Poland and Scandinavia.

That said, the Belgians are very foil to foamy wine and, on the basis of my tasting, I would say that Belgian grapes, such as their English counterparts, are very suitable to produce effervescence, thanks to their relatively high acidity. (Much of the low compliance with 2024 became bright). I enjoyed the responses to the champagne made not only by Eburon but also by Schorpion, Entre-Deux-Monts and the well established Genoels-Elderen.

The Belgian Chardonnay first impressed me for a long time ago as in 2007 when, in the Intelligent Flamenco restaurant Hof Van Cleve, the sommelier served me and a closing winemate of Clos D’Opleeuw armor and we took it for a Puligny monongense. Since then, I have enjoyed examples of the new company La Faice, advised by the owner of the small and walled clos d’Opleuw, Peter Colemont, and Ch of Bousval, whose refined Chardonnays are imported to the United Kingdom by Haynes Hanson & Clark.

My tasting of a dozen Belgian wines selected by Rodríguez and Tiggelman also included three Pinot Noirs. I especially liked the purity and freshness of Eburon 2023, which did not show an obvious oak, a great feat since, perforces, this debut harvest had been matured in new barrels. On the contrary, the 2018 Vogelsonck of the well-established Genoels-Elder seemed a bit exaggerated, but this is probably not true for the most youthful examples.

However, one of the Belgian wines that I have enjoyed the most was a Riesling in 2017 of Aldeneyck, which they gave me to bring London back. It served with a much younger risk of the apostelhoeve equally well established, cultivated just on the border, it was particularly well with wine -loving friends, including a Belgian and someone who had worked several years in The Hague.

The number of Belgian wineries increased by 11 percent by 2024. Be careful, England.

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