Can Belgian wine become as famous as Belgian beer?

One should, of course, be wary of mentioning national stereotypes, but these observations were volunteered jointly by a Belgian and a Dutchman as we tasted wine together in Belgium near the Dutch border: Belgians have a very different approach to the Dutch. They love to go out and spend. In a restaurant they’ll probably kick off with some champagne, whereas the Dutch are quite miserly and are more likely to go for the house wine.

In the world of wine, Belgians have long enjoyed an elevated reputation for connoisseurship. For years in the early 20th century, Belgium imported far more of the smart wines of Bordeaux, the crus classés, than any other country, including the UK and US. The Belgians were also the first to spot that Pomerol was really a rather glorious drink when the uptight Brits were still dismissing even Petrus, now Bordeaux’s most expensive wine, as an obscure country ferment.

But today, Belgian wine drinkers are increasingly being exposed to wines produced in their own country. At the tasting mentioned above, the Belgian wine writer and ex-editor of Belgium’s wine magazine Vino, Dirk Rodriguez, treated me to a history of his country’s wine in the modern era. It began with a handful of pioneers in the 1960s, followed by a second wave in the 1990s, producers that are all still in business. Another clutch of Belgian vignerons emerged in the early years of this century and now, according to Rodriguez, “not a month has passed without a new domain seeing the light”.

The association of Belgian winegrowers already has more than 200 members and it regularly participates in the major European wine trade fairs in Paris and Düsseldorf. Many of the members previously grew other fruit, particularly apples. Vineyards can be found in much of the country except for the far south-east, which is just too wet. The greatest concentration of vineyards is between Brussels and Maastricht over the Dutch border (a pretty town that, I was assured, is more Belgian than Dutch, as was evidenced by the number of people drinking in outdoor cafés on the late March afternoon I spent there).

The total area of Belgian vineyards is under 1,000ha, so less than one-quarter of the extent of viticulture in Britain but more than most other far northern European countries. Poland has about the same total area under vine but far more individual growers, suggesting that the average Belgian wine producer is more commercially viable than its Polish counterpart.

My Belgian wine tasting took place at a very nascent Belgian winery. Eburon Estate has only 1.5ha of vines at the moment, and a tiny winery with just a dozen barrels and six small fermentation tanks, but it could not be faulted for ambition, nor the quality of its wines, even if for now it’s only a part-time occupation for its owners.

Paul Molleman and Marco Tiggelman work together as full-time employees of California’s Wine Institute in The Hague. Just before my tasting, Tiggelman had flown back from promoting California wine in Africa as part of US agriculture’s campaign there. He has a long history of generic wine promotion, working first for the famous Hazel Murphy, who did so much to introduce Australian wine to the UK in the 1990s, and then promoting wines from such corners of eastern Europe as Moldova and North Macedonia.

But he’d 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 involving several divorces and an old flame saw him take over a small, rather neglected vineyard in 2023, with Molleman investing in a new winery for it. It had been planted in 2015 near the village of Vreren, just south of the oldest town in Belgium, Tongeren.

Since then, in his free time, he and his partner Flore Engels have been feverishly restoring the vineyard to health and converting the rather handsome Flemish barns on the property into a bed and breakfast and living quarters.

Other distinguishing marks include their 10 Ouessant miniature sheep, whose job is to fertilise the vineyard and keep the cover crops in check. Their Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Auxerrois and recently planted Syrah vines benefit from a slight slope, but not one steep enough to protect them from Belgian viticulture’s most unusual and catastrophic April 22 2024 frost, which reduced the country’s total harvest from well over three million litres in 2023 to just over one million in 2024. Eburon’s grape crop was reduced from 4,400kg to 600kg in the same period, not the greatest start for an embryonic business.

With the exception of unpredictable frosts, low temperatures are no longer a problem for Belgian vignerons. Summer days can now reach 30C or more. Wines of 13.5 per cent alcohol are common. The biggest hazard is humidity. Average annual rainfall is 900mm in much of Belgium’s wine country, more than ideal. “[Vine] disease control is a problem,” Tiggelman admitted, pointing out that Belgians, with their long love for French wine made from the European vine species Vitis vinifera, are much less enthusiastic about disease-resistant hybrid vine varieties than is the case in the Netherlands, Poland and Scandinavia.

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That said, Belgians are very fond of sparkling wine and, on the basis of my tasting, I’d say Belgian grapes, like their English counterparts, are well suited to producing fizz, thanks to their relatively high acidity. (Much of the underripe 2024 was made sparkling.) I enjoyed answers to champagne made not just by Eburon but by Schorpion, Entre-Deux-Monts and the well-established Genoels-Elderen.

Belgian Chardonnay first impressed me as long ago as 2007 when, in the smart Flemish restaurant Hof Van Cleve, the sommelier served me and a fellow Master of Wine one from Clos d’Opleeuw blind and we took it for a Puligny-Montrachet. Since then, I’ve enjoyed examples from the newer enterprise La Falize, advised by the owner of the tiny, walled Clos d’Opleeuw, Peter Colemont, and from Ch de Bousval, whose refined Chardonnays are imported into the UK by Haynes Hanson & Clark.

My tasting of a dozen Belgian wines handpicked by Rodriguez and Tiggelman included three Pinot Noirs too. I particularly liked the purity and freshness of the Eburon 2023, which showed no obvious oakiness — quite a feat since, perforce, this debut vintage had been matured in brand new barrels. By contrast, the 2018 Vogelsanck from the well-established château-based Genoels-Elderen seemed a little over-extracted, but this is probably not true of more youthful examples.

One of the Belgian wines I have recently enjoyed the most, however, was a fully mature 2017 Riesling from Aldeneyck, which I’d been given to bring back to London. Served alongside a much younger Dutch Riesling from the equally well-established Apostelhoeve, grown just over the border, it went down 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 per cent in 2024. Watch out, England.

The increasing hazard of frost

It is not just summers but winters too that are warming up. The result in vineyards is that vines are budding earlier and earlier, leaving them prey to the sort of disaster that befell Belgium’s 2024 vintage. Meanwhile, spring frosts seem to be becoming more frequent and unpredictable.

Frost is dangerous only when vines have started to produce buds. If temperatures fall below freezing, ice forms on the embryonic plant material, which can turn brown and eventually drop off. Healthy green growth produces shoots, leaves and the flowers that would have eventually produced fruit, so frost damage can seriously shrink the size of the eventual crop. There can be secondary growth after spring frost but it is never as fruitful, and ripening will in any case be delayed.

Hollows where cold air collects are especially prone to frost, and flat land — of which there is a lot in Belgium — is more vulnerable than slopes because there is no air movement.

Some wine regions have long been more affected by spring frosts than most. Chablis is a case in point and many growers there have installed spray systems that can warm up the soil, vines and atmosphere, and protect the vines. On the Napa Valley floor, wind machines stir up the cold air and helicopters are occasionally hired to do the same job.

Seriously damaging spring frost is a relatively recent phenomenon in Burgundy, where vines are traditionally trained dangerously close to the ground. In 2017 and 2018 the community of vignerons was mobilised to burn straw bales, but the smoke is such an environmental hazard that a more common strategy today, here and in much of frost-prone Europe, is now to light warming candles throughout the vineyard.

This makes the prettiest pictures for Instagram but is extremely labour intensive and not without cost and environmental damage of its own. Very well-funded vignerons may install wires that can be heated.

Spring frost caused major damage to the 2021 vintage in much of Europe, including Bordeaux, as it had done in 1991.

Autumn frosts can also affect the crop in late-ripening wine regions such as Ribera del Duero in Spain, where night-time temperatures close to freezing in September are not uncommon.