Foreigners in Switzerland who want to know more about Swiss wines and the vineyards that dot the countryside now have a good resource. Ellen’s Wine World, a free website in English about Swiss wines, launched officially this week.
Writer Ellen Wallace says the site’s mix of wine reviews (250 a year), vineyard profiles, interviews with winemakers, wine and food news and other features is designed to make foreigners fall in love with Swiss wines, just as she has done.
Ellen isn’t simply a fan of good wine. She’s a judge at major international wine competitions including the Mondial des Pinots and the Mondial du Merlot as well as at Switzerland’s national wine competition, the Grand Prix des Vins Suisses. She’s been writing about European wine, often linked to travel and cuisine, since 1982, initially from Paris for Time Magazine, Business Week, the International Herald Tribune (with special sections on Swiss wine) and a number of international travel magazines.
She now leads wine tasting courses and sessions, mainly for private groups and she was responsible for the English version of the reference work, Swiss Wine Guide, published by the Vinea Association. She now works on the smart phone app. Her newest project is a book coming out in August on Swiss wines.
“People who move to Switzerland suddenly notice all the vines everywhere – these are a fantastic part of the landscape – and they suddenly realize they know next to nothing about Swiss wine, because so little is exported.
“We tend to fall into two groups: people who know a lot about other wines but who have this hole in their knowledge and people who are new to wine. I meet a lot of people who are keen to learn about Swiss wine - usually starting with how and where can I buy wine I think I’ll like.” The “good wines” section on the site should offer them some guidance, she says.
A starting point for people new to Swiss wine, she insists, is to realize that Switzerland has many world-class wines, and scores of others that are very, very good. The quality of the wines has been rising steadily for the past 25 years and Swiss wines now regularly win international awards.
The site, written and published by Ellen, grew out of her blog “Among the vines”, published on the Swiss news site GenevaLunch.com, which she founded in 2006.
“I began to have too much to write about wine to fit in a daily news site” she says, “and there’s such a paucity of information in English about Swiss wine that I realized it needed a site of its own. GenevaLunch.com broke the barrier of 5 million pages viewed last month. I decided to celebrate by taking a mini-break to set up Ellen’s Wine World.”
The site is aimed primarily at foreigners in Switzerland who want to learn more about the country’s wines, but it’s also attracting the attention of wine bloggers and social media abroad as a source of reliable information about Swiss wines.
“The very things that make Swiss wines so special are the same ones that can make them seem inaccessible to people trying to understand them. The country is a jewelbox of beautiful grape varieties, with more than 40 native grapes used for wines that you don’t find anywhere else. But this is decentralized Switzerland, so you don’t have a coherent national labelling system that would help outsiders keep wines straight. There are so many micro-climates and geographic differences, and these give rise to very different wines. And then there are the prices, which are good value for money but people don’t understand why - contrary to the cliché, many, many Swiss wines are less expensive and better than comparable wines elsewhere, in France, for example.”
Ellen calls herself a perpetual wine student, and she hopes the site will open doors for others who also want to keep learning, from newbies to experts to those who wonder why anyone would want to talk about wine instead of just drinking it. Do both, she suggests, and you’ll double the pleasure.
Ellen’s Wine World
ellenwine.com
www.facebook.com/EllensWineWorld
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