The vineyard in may

My name is Emma, I am 25 years old and I would like to share with you a little bit of my daily life as a Winemaker in Sweden. After all, wine is a moment of sharing, often connected to a story, so I'll tell you a bit of my story to help you understand my vision of wine.

A little bit of absence in the middle of spring. A lot happened here in Thora so I have many things to tell you!

The month of May has been very busy: planting 10 000 young vine plants, studying the soils, welcoming new seasonal staff, setting up a new range of wine for the summer, creating new labels, preparing the wine for bottling... As I said, it was busy!

We have planted 10,000 vine plants, with only viti vinifera varieties: Chardonnay and Pinot noir. We have also planted Chenin Blanc and Gamay Noir, first time in Sweden! We'll have to be patient to find out how the Chenin and Gamay grapes get on here, but I must say that I’m very excited to see the results.

Let's talk about our soil study this spring. This subject doesn't seem much fun, but it is essential for us, winemakers and winegrowers.

The interest of this study was to understand a little more the "terroir" of the vineyard. Terroir is certainly a very French or Mediterranean notion as it is very much embedded in the wine culture. Terroir defines all the human, climatic and environmental factors that can influence the wine.

And the soil is one of the factors that are often overlooked when planting vines. From my point of view as French, here in Sweden, vineyards appear very quickly, because it is trendy to plant vine, but if you want to make a quality wine you cannot neglect the knowledge of your soil.

Before planting, it was important to know the soil, chemically speaking but also to know its structure. We already knew the chemical part of the soil, thanks to laboratory analysis, but to know the structure, well, we had to dig and dig... but when I’m talking about dig under, I am talking about the first 3 meters of depth because it is on this depth that the roots of the vines will grow. Even if they can go much deeper than that!

On the 7 hectares that we have now, there are very different soils on each parcel and sometimes even between each parcel there are very important differences.

As a result, we have six different terroirs: Each terroir has its own composition with sand, pieces of granite, blue clay and in some places a bit of limestone.

It’s going to be interesting to observe the impact this mixture will have on the wine in the future. Let’s talk about this next time! See you

Emma