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Belgium's winegrowers have long been overlooked by the average Belgian and rightly so, because their production has been very amateurish. But the vines they are a-changing.Belgium makes some seriously good wines
Say the words "Belgian wine" to most people and you will as likely as not be met with a blank stare.
Belgium is world famous, and rightly so, for the quality and variety of the beers it produces.
But the country has never been a big hitter in the wine stakes.
But all that could be about to change.
Belgium now has some extremely respectable vineyards producing some very decent plonk.
And none more so than Wijnkasteel Genoels-Elderen, near the Belgian-Dutch border at Reimst.
Cellar master Joyce Kékkö-van Rennes studied wine growing in France and in her hands the vineyard's Chardonnay and Pinot noir vines from Burgundy are now producing grapes that compare very favourably with any grown in the motherland.
Genoels-Elderen has a long history of vine growing. The first vineyards were established in the area by the Romans and the region was well-known for wine production until the Napoleonic times, when the so called Little Ice-age made the climate too cold.
Fortunately the weather has been steadily warming up ever since and according to Kékkö-van Rennes, temperatures are now roughly comparable to those in Burgundy a hundred years ago.
Genoels-Elderen was the first vineyard in Belgium to receive the right to use
l'Appellation d'Origin Contrôlée (AOC) label.
The estate owned by Joyce Kékkö-van Rennes' family has 16 hectares of vineyards and the first Chardonnays were planted in the beginning of the 1990s.
Gathering the grapes
Harvesting is one of the busiest periods in a vineyard.
"We hire about 50 seasonal workers every year to pick the grapes. It is all done manually in order to preserve the best quality of the grapes. A couple of years ago we tried harvesting machines on half of the production, but the wines made out of those grapes were not up to our standards," Kékkö-van Rennes explains.
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