As France Tears Out Grapevines, Winemaking Expands Across Scandinavia
With cratering domestic wine consumption, the uncertainty of on-again, off-again tariffs on exports to the U.S., and serious challenges from climate change, many French winemakers and grape growers are considering a heartbreaking offer. Starting this month, vineyard owners can apply for funds of €4,000 per hectare — equivalent to about $1,910 per acre — if they agree to tear out their wine grapes for good. Known as “l’arrachage,” the €130 million uprooting program has been trumpeted as part of the French government’s “plan de sortie de crise viticole,” or “wine crisis exit plan,” in its recently approved 2026 budget. The funds are enough to rip out 32,500 hectares of vines, or about 80,000 acres.
But as the wine industry in the Old World’s traditional viticultural regions slows down, the pace is picking up in Northern Europe. Across Scandinavia, new wine grapes are going in, rather than being torn out, many of which are being planted well beyond the 50 degree latitude that has traditionally defined the functional northern boundary of Old World wine production. While most new wineries across Norway, Sweden, and Denmark are using hybrid-descended varieties to make dry whites, some producers are seeing success with rosés, pét-nats, traditional-method sparkling wines, and even a few reds — while some are even using the very same grape cultivars that are being torn out of historic estates far to the south.
Such changes are coming quickly, with the earliest attempts at serious winemaking in many northern regions barely dating back a couple of decades. On the Danish island of Funen, Jacob Stokkebye launched his own winery, Stokkebye Vineyard, by planting 1,000 vines in his backyard in 2009.
“We expanded, year by year, to about 17,000 vines today,” he says. “And we are going to plant another 4,500 this year.”
No Longer a Hobby
While it might sound like a comparable swap, newly planted vineyards in Scandinavia are unlikely to offset the loss of 35,000 hectares of French grapevines this year. According to Sveneric Svensson, chairman of the Swedish Wine Association, his country had a total of only 185 hectares of wine grapes in 2025. He expects that number to increase by the end of this year, however, to as much as 220 hectares.
That’s a major change from the situation 25 years ago, when the first Swedish wine enthusiasts were growing a few grapes in greenhouses, or launching their initial plantings of cold-hardy varieties outside.
“The most difficult thing is that Denmark is a new wine country. Old information is new information in our case.”
“It was all about a hobby in the beginning,” Svensson says. “But let’s say 10 years ago, or a bit more, perhaps, we saw the first beginnings of an industrial wine sector in Sweden.”
Of course, not every part of Scandinavia — a region that, at its northern extreme, lies partially within the Arctic Circle — is able to grow grapes. Most Swedish winemakers are in southern regions like Scania, just across the sound from Denmark, on the islands Öland and Gotland, or near the large inland lakes, Vänern and Vättern. Denmark’s wineries are at about the same latitudes, while even the northernmost Norwegian winemakers are generally only slightly higher up on the map. This might be the “north,” compared to Europe as a whole, but in Scandinavian terms, this is the warm, sunny south.
Nor are these northern winemakers likely to replace the wines of Bandol and Côte Rôtie anytime soon. While one of the first grapes to attract interest in the region was Rondo, a cold-hardy red-wine hybrid originally developed in the 1960s in what was then Czechoslovakia, it didn’t really work out. The fruit looked beautiful, Svensson says, but drinkers found many of the red wines made from it disappointing. Instead, most Northern European winemakers have found success with dry whites made from Solaris, a cold-hardy PiWi grape, partially descended from hybrids, but classified as Vitis vinifera.
“When Solaris came around, that was a revolution,” Svensson says. “If you ask me, the Swedish grape is Solaris. It’s covering 60 percent of the area.”
In Denmark, Stokkebye also grows a healthy amount of Solaris. He finds that even experienced tasters can have trouble identifying the grape.
“In a blind tasting, many people think first of all, ‘Oh, this is a Sauvignon Blanc,’ he says. “They start in the Loire, in France, and in the way of Sancerre, but then they switch to New Zealand.”
While his five-hectare vineyard has done well with dry whites, it also includes Denmark’s largest plantings of Pinot Noir, which he uses to make traditional sparkling wines. One of the disadvantages of making wine in the north, he notes, can be a benefit when it comes to both acidity and the stress of harvest.
“You can see today in France, Italy, and Spain, they’re stuck with all this sun,” he says. In hotter climates in the south, grapes ripen very quickly, at earlier and earlier dates, often necessitating a speedy harvest, with less margin for error. “Here, we have the acidity, and we harvest very late. For example, our Pinot Noir, we harvest in October. In France, in Champagne, they mostly harvest at the end of August.”
Inspired by his earlier career as a sommelier in France, Stokkebye primarily sells his wines through fine-dining restaurants across Scandinavia, ideally as one of the recommended wine pairings for a multi-course menu.
“It means the guests get a presentation of our wine,” he says. “That helps a lot as a new wine country, because if we just sell our wine to a hotel or restaurant, and you can find Danish wine on page 23 of the wine card, nobody buys it.”
For now, most Scandinavian wines are sold in the Nordic countries, with a few exports also going to Germany and other established markets in Europe. Estates tend to be on the small side, with even the largest wineries in the region making plans to get up to 8,000 or 9,000 cases per year — if they’re lucky.
Sales appear to be particularly tricky in Sweden, due to the longstanding state monopoly on alcohol sales. However, a “breakthrough” change in the law last year allows winemakers to sell directly to consumers, with a few conditions.
“If you have visitors for a wine tasting, and you can educate them, and you have to talk for at least 30 minutes about wines, and you have to warn about the effects of alcohol,” Svensson says. “Having done that, they will be permitted to buy four bottles.”
Challenges and Upsides
Another challenge to making wine in the north can be a simple lack of local know-how. Thanks to his years in France, Stokkebye often consults with winemaking friends back in Bordeaux and Champagne. Other Scandinavian vintners may not have the same resources.
“The most difficult thing is that Denmark is a new wine country,” Stokkebye says. “Old information is new information in our case.”
As such, this appears to be a period of trial and error. Solaris looks to be another clear success at Norway’s Frejya Vin, which planted its first vines in 2019, even at the winery’s extreme latitude of 61.2 degrees north. But according to co-founder Zsuzsanna Barna, other plantings haven’t quite worked out.
“We tried Bacchus, Gewürztraminer, Grüner Veltliner, Dornfelder, and Riesling as well, but they don’t really ripen just yet,” she says. However, those grapes might come into their own at a later date. “Since we first planted the grapes, we can see that the weather is warming,” she says.
“It was all about a hobby in the beginning. But let’s say 10 years ago, or a bit more, perhaps, we saw the first beginnings of an industrial wine sector in Sweden.”
Many of the most successful Scandinavian vineyards share characteristics with more traditional viticultural regions, including types of soil and settings near water, which tend to moderate temperatures and offer enough wind to reduce moisture and mildew. The warm southern peninsula where Thora Vingård is located was once famous for producing Sweden’s first new potatoes of the year. But in oenologist Romain Chichery’s eyes, the location shares many traits with winemaking areas in his home country of France.
“It’s definitely one of the best places in Sweden to grow grapes,” he says. “We are about 500 meters from the sea. We are facing southwest, so it’s very well exposed. The rainfall during the year lands between 500 to 900 millimeters, so it’s about the same as in Bordeaux.” The team at Thora has identified seven distinct terroirs across the winery’s 11 hectares, including those with sandstone and granite features.
Eyes on the Future
Some aspects of Scandinavian winemaking might be fairly unique, like the unexpectedly large loss of wine grapes to wild deer at Frejya. However, vintners say the biggest challenge is the one faced by winemakers almost everywhere: learning to work with the weather, when the weather isn’t really cooperating.
With that in mind, many winemakers are clearly thinking about the future. Chichery and his partner and fellow oenologist Emma Berto started working at Thora in 2021, when the vineyard covered just four hectares. Plantings now make up 11 hectares, with a goal of up to 20 hectares within the next eight years. Much of that is Solaris, to which Chichery and Berto have applied different techniques, ranging from 100 percent stainless steel to 100 percent oak, including Swedish oak, using barrels of various sizes to get the results they want. But as part of the winery’s long-term plan, Chichery and Berto are also planting Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Pinot Meunier, Gamay, Chenin Blanc, and even small trials of Cabernet Franc and Malbec, which Chichery describes as “thinking ahead,” in light of reports that climate change is clearly going to continue.
“The vines, it takes time for them to produce the first grapes, but also to produce good-quality grapes,” he says. “You plant the vines for at least 100 years. If we work properly, they will be suitable — and fantastic — within the next decades.”
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