Ep. 193 Monty Waldin interviews Niklas Bergqvist (Sommelier at Vinkallaren Grappe) | Education meets Business

Italian wine podcast. Chinching with Italian wine people. This podcast is brought to you by Native Grape Odyssey. Native Grape Odyssey is an educational project financed by the European Union to promote European wine in Canada, Japan, and Russia. Enjoy. It's from Europe. Hello. This is the Italian wine podcast. My name is Montewood. My guest today is Nicholas Bergquist. Nicholas is from Sweden. Yes, gonna tell us all about the Swedish market and his wine club. Welcome. Thank you, Montin. So how did you get into wine? I got into wine as I, I started out, going to chef school. So it's a very interesting food, at that particular moment, and then, I start working with, as a chef and also was very interested in skiing and did some seasons in the French Alps, and it's very hard to work and ski at the same time. So It's pretty hard to cook and ski the same time as well. It's pretty hard. So I spent quite a lot of time, skiing instead of working and felt that I really needed to do something that was in accordance to what I worked with. So I spent a lot of the evenings, reading about wine and and so on and got really interested by it. And then I decided that I wanna wanted to get some of your education to just get a better understanding of how to pair wine and food, and then I went down to the Alps again, did some really bad ski, broke my leg terribly badly, and couldn't walk for two years. And after that, I decided that I had a lot of time when I couldn't work, couldn't walk. So I did a WST diploma. And by now, I've studied so much wine that there's really no point in going back, working in the kitchen. So in terms of the market there and but you and your club, what how does that actually work? A wine club? We are a wine. It's a monopoly system in Sweden. Exactly. So we are a wine collector's club. We don't sell any wine at all. It's, like, a big sell that was originally started out in nineteen eighty six. And the whole idea about it was to give people that live in apartments in central stock on the possibility of storing wine under perfect conditions. So, what my boss did was that he bought a big cellar and, got it like a cooling and, humid controlling system so that we get roughly the same temperature and humidity that you have in a natural wine cellar. And by now, we have, like, nine hundred different compartments, different sizes from sixty to four hundred bottles that each member has one, or in some cases, many different compartments for someone might need one for Barolo and one for Barbaresco and one for brunello and and so on. This there, is there any wine educational aspect to what that is? Obviously, a storage thing is pretty kind of sedate. It's bottles lying horizontally and Exactly. And that was also one of the main ideas was to get people to interact both with wine and with one another, while drinking wine. So apart from just storing bottles, we have like a club room where the members can come and drink their own wines. We don't sell any wine at all. It would be legal in Sweden to have both, like, a wine bar and, serving people's own wines at the same time. So it's only the the member's wine that we we help them open them and check so that everything is in order, and and if they have questions about them, then we're supposed to be able to give them a bit of information. So where do they actually have these tasting evenings or is it in that same building the wine is stored in? Exactly. So you're that's you're legally allowed to do that then. Are you? Yes. So you must have a license for on We we don't we don't need to have a license. We we don't sell. First and then. It's a nice Don't people copy your idea? We have, in in Sweden at the moment, I think we're, are two or three companies that work kind of, in the same way. In other parts of the world, of course, there would be a lot of very different possibilities of making it the same kind of setup, but also actually selling the wine. And we would of course be thrilled to do that too, but, it looks like it might be here a long time up ahead in the future because we get Yes. Exactly. So when you're not in your home country and you've in wine regions, where is your, where are your favorite regions? I I would say that, apart from working in this, club, I am also a wine educator, you know, working in school for some years, and my main responsibility there is Italy. So that's definitely where I have spent most of my trips in the last few years, but I also Is interest in Italian wine growing in Sweden? I think Italian wine is it's a very big part of of the Swedish market. So it's actually the biggest country that we the major part of of the imports, but on the other hand, a lot of that consumption is very, very cheap bagging box wines from the southern parts of Italy. But I would say that at the moment in the higher end of the market, Italy is very, very interesting too, and I think that especially Olo and Barbaresco associated Nebula style of wine. They are definitely something that's becoming of a big interest to people that are perhaps not even the most wine interested person. It's going it's you need to get big on a much broader basis. I mean, does that, obviously, those wines are some of the most expensive in Italy? Does that reflect the Swedish economy has been quite strong for quite a long time? Yeah. And I and I think we see that too that there is a much bigger interest in higher end kinds of wines. And for a long time, it was really, really hard to sell wines in Sweden that were, like, above ten euros or something like that. It was a very small part of the market, but now I think for a lot of people, it's a a good thing to buy wines that are ten, fifteen euro. That's is more of an three day style of wine and people tend to buy more expensive and more specific styles of wine in the high end of the What do you think the next trend in Italian wine in Sweden will be? Would it be like, less expensive wines, Lambrusco, or would it be Alianico something like that? Or I think it's very dependent on which end of the market you are in. I think it's, many of the restaurants are very, very into natural wines. The monopoly is definitely going there too. So it's from a couple of years ago, you definitely it didn't find anything that was a natural style of wine in the monopoly nowadays they have quite a lot of it, but I think that's a part of the market is very interested in that. Other parts of the market are very interested in other styles of wine. And I would say that I think there is a quite a big interest for the classic wines, like, brunello, for example, is something that's definitely you see a lot of, again, and especially the more traditionally focused ones. And I think a lot of people now are interested in classical styles of wine and especially from wineries that have a quite a long history and and a track record of, making great wines and people are interested in in finding older wintages of of those wines. Okay. I just wanna say thanks to my guest today, Nicholas Bergquist from Sweden, letting us giving us an insight into what lies beneath the city of Stockholm, all those bottles sleeping, and possibly not always sleeping. That's are nice to meet you. This podcast has been brought to you by Native Grape Odyssey, discovering the true essence high quality wine from Europe. Find out more on native grape odyssey dot e u. Enjoy. It's from Europe. Follow Italian wine podcast on Facebook and Instagram.