The Road to Wine

One day in early spring 2024, I stood behind the counter at Enoteka talking to a customer about a wine from a big house with a famous name. He wanted to know if we had it, and I replied that we only carry wines from small producers, so I couldn’t help him with that one.

There was an other option, though. I could offer him a comparable wine from the same area, made with the same grapes, but crafted in the authentic way. No added sulfites and no excessive processing in the cellar. Only gentle fermentation using the family’s homemade yeast that had been passed down through generations along with the vineyard itself.

He bought the wine, and I could see the relief in his eyes when he realized he could get a bottle of liquid nature in top quality without having to pay for the label. His errand wasn’t to impress anyone with the wine — he just wanted a good bottle for himself. The expensive one was simply the one he knew about.

In that moment, I realized how crucial the right stories are for our choices. Not that I hadn’t understood this in the abstract, but here it crystallized in a very concrete way.

At the same time, it became clear to me that the world of wine was missing a medium that tells the raw, authentic stories about the people behind the wine. Simply because they are the very foundation of good wine — and therefore also the stories we navigate by.

Life before–now

In the months that followed the experience made me reflect on my own story. My family’s passion for Italian food and wine. My childhood summer holidays in 1980s Italy, where I was dragged from vineyard to vineyard. The half-year we lived down there, and not least my mother’s Italian wine shop in Aarhus in the 1990s while I was training to become a journalist.

The whole package was there, and under normal circumstances I would probably have settled in the land of the boot as an adult. Instead I turned my back on it all and went off on my own adventure. Became a journalist with big ambitions and worked as, among other things, a political speechwriter, facilitator and brand consultant.

Right up until the door to the world of wine opened again.

The door to Italy

It was in the autumn of 2023, and my working life was hanging by a thread. In 2020 I had shut down a larger Danish-American media project, and the pandemic hammered the last nails into the coffin. I had to think anew.

I discussed the situation with my good friend Niklas at Enoteka, his little Italian wine shop in Helsingør. He had just cut all staff and was running the shop alone, but he still offered me the chance to start working with him.

I said yes. Partly to be able to pay the rent, partly because I needed a break from the media and communications world. I needed to do something else — something where I could go to work every day without having to think too much about it.

And that’s how it was for the first six months. I was grateful for the job and didn’t read more into it. But the world of wine opened up in step with the customer interactions in the shop, and precisely that day in early spring 2024 it became clear to me: this was the way forward.

Life was speaking its clear language and steering me toward this unique agricultural product that means so much to us humans in our pursuit of enjoying life.

Roots in one’s own soil

In other words, I said yes to the adventure in the world of wine. In the end, we can only put down roots in our own soil, and the deeper they go, the easier it becomes to cultivate ourselves.

For me, it became a fusion of wine and journalism. I would never have found it without my childhood summers in Italy and my adult life as a journalist. Nor without Enoteka.

I am grateful for that, but I also know that I must make the path my own and give it my signature if there is to be deeper meaning in life.

That is exactly what MotoVino Adventures is about.