About

Welcome to my blog on wine, food and other good things in life. Since you may not know me, I thought I should introduce myself briefly. If you do know me, read it anyway and have a laugh at my obvious self-conceit:-)

I was born in southern Greenland in 1965, of Danish parents who were outposted there. It is difficult to say exactly how, but I am in no doubt that the physical sourroundings, the climate and the sheer beauty of southern Greenland have had a profound impact on my mentality. I want to think that they are why I have a robust, generally happy disposition and a strong urge towards maximizing enjoyment of life, particularly when it comes to my senses of smell and taste. I have many clear and strong memories of already as a small boy being very curious and sensation-seeking in terms of food and drink.

After some 12 years in Greenland, the lack of proper educational facilities saw me relocated to the Danish public (=boarding) school Herlufsholm. The strongly international environment there led me further down the path of curiosity in all things edible and drinkable. After Herlufsholm – at the age of 18 – I moved to Copenhagen to study law, and from then on my interest has only continued to build, what with easy access to many of the world’s greatest foodstuffs and wines. My subsequent career within the international oil industry has taken me to some of the furthest corners of the Earth, and I have thus been very fortunate to be able feed the never-sated curious beast lurking within me with the finest and most exotic wines and foods around.

Very early on in my life, I took a great interest in all things Italian. It should come as no great surprise, then, that my main area of interest in terms of wine and food should be Italy. I am completely in love with the complexity and diverse aspects of the Italian gastronomic and vinous heritage, and I have made it my special business since around 1985 to get to know as much about it as at all possible. I have been gifted with a very capacious memory, and so the amount of knowledge I have gathered on the subjects is by now rather large.

Further exposure to the pulsating wine scene in Copenhagen from the mid-80’ies onwards  – particularly by way of my encounter with Carlo Merolli, the most important importer of Italian wine in Denmark through the ages, as well as frequent blind tastings at Vinrosen and Le Papillon (see links section) – taught me a lot about wine tasting and evaluation. It also taught me a lot about Italian and French wines in particular, and has lead to a strong and enduring love for the wines of Italy and Burgundy, and for Port.

From the mid 90’ies I started writing infrequent – basically when my day job allowed it – articles about Italian wines, mostly in the very serious Norwegian magazine Vinforum (see links section). During the mid-to-late 1990’ies, I also participated in Italian wine knowledge competition Gran Maestro del Vino Italiano, always ending up in the finals, but never quite winning it. In 2003 I co-authored an encyclopedic book about Italian wine with 4 other Italian wine enthusiasts. This book was published in Danish and Norwegian and has done rather well over the years, in numerous imprints and two editions in each language.

I have nurtured a strong love of southern Italian grape varieties, wines and food for decades, so when in recent years I have had the luck and honour of being invited to wine fairs, festivals and competitions in southern Italy as a judge, I have thankfully accepted. My participation at these events has further struck home the fact of the enormous, world-beating quality and value to be had in southern Italy, which – alas – is not always understood or recognized as much as it deserves.

After much prompting on the part of southern Italians and other good friends, I have therefore now decided to write this blog. The blog is primarily thought as a means for me to write about southern Italian wines, but since I eat and drink voraciously of anything that might be even vaguely interesting, no doubt many other wines as well as foods and restaurants will feature.

My ambition here is not to be the new Robert Parker, but to honestly and passionately describe my chosen subjects, while still maintaining a demanding day job and a family. I will also be indulging my craving for writing long and detailed pieces that are intoxicated by the exuberance of my own verbosity. Blogging might therefore be infrequent and somewhat unstructured. You should not expect me to score the wines I describe, as I much prefer to let the prose speak for the wines. If I do provide scores, those will be the ones I have awarded in wine competitions and the like, and tasting notes may in such instances be very scarce indeed. I do consider myself a good and experienced taster with a deep knowledge of grape varieties, winemaking technology and typicity. I also think that I am a dab hand at writing tasting notes. So no doubt you will be completely unable to recognize what I write about wine:-)

You have been duly warned.