The Netherlands is a country in northern Europe, often referred to as 'Holland', the name of the ancient county in the western Netherlands where the key cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague are located. The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which includes Aruba, Curacao and Sint Maarten, its overseas island territories in the Caribbean. To complicate matters further, the demonym of the Netherlands is 'Dutch'.
The Netherlands is bordered by Belgium to the south, Germany to the east and the Nordzee (North Sea) to the north and west.
The Dutch produce very little wine – their climate is simply too cool and damp to support quality viniculture. But the Dutch influence on European wine over the centuries has nonetheless been significant. Like the English just across the North Sea, the Dutch have long been avid wine consumers, providing a reliable export market for all sorts of European wines, notably those from France and Germany. Rotterdam's location at the meeting point of the Scheldt, Meuse and Rhine rivers made it the logical end point for wine barges floating downstream from the great wine regions of Germany. Thus the wines of Baden, Pfalz, Nahe and Alsace all made their way to The Netherlands, meeting along the way those floating down the Mosel.
The Bordeaux wine region in south-western France has been particularly influenced by Dutch wine interest in the past 500 years. With all the media attention now lavished on the region's top chateaux, one might be forgiven for thinking that Bordeaux wine is the be-all and end-all of French wine, perhaps even of wine full stop. But just a few centuries ago, Bordeaux was more of a wine-trading post than a wine region. The port lay conveniently downriver from Bergerac, Fronton, Cahors and Gaillac (located on the Dordogne, Garonne, Lot and Tarn rivers respectively), the key wine-producing areas of the time. It was thus an ideal location from which to ship robust red wine from these places across the English Channel to England and up the coast to what is now the Netherlands.
When the English ownership of Bordeaux ended in the 1450s, the Dutch were quick to capitalize on the situation and soon came to dominate the Bordeaux market. It is the entrepreneurial Dutch we have to thank for draining the Medoc, home to such names as Lafite, Latour, Margaux and Mouton. It was once a boggy coastal peninsula dotted with marshes and pine forests, but the Dutch applied the same land-drainage expertise they had used at home in Holland and Zeeland (the county after which New Zealand is named), and the Medoc is now one of the finest wine terroirs in the world.
Just a couple of centuries later, wines from the Medoc were among the finest and most expensive in France, and in 1855 were evaluated and ranked by the classification that still stands today, the 1855 Classification of the Medoc and Graves. Once again, Dutch influence was significant here, as the final ranking of the wines was based on the prices each fetched on the open market, of which Holland controlled a considerable share.
In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Netherlands was also the world's largest market for the wines of Jerez (Sherry), and the country has also provided a test bed and springboard for numerous wine brands and styles from the New World.
As for the Netherlands' own wine production, there is little to report other than a growing number of small-scale, independent winemaking enterprises. Private winemaking in the Netherlands has become fashionable since the 1970s and, thanks to the effects of climate change, increasingly practicable. The country is better known, though, for its beers (Amstel, Grolsch and Heineken are the most widely known) and liqueurs (Bols and de Kuyper among them).
The world also has the Dutch to thank for the development of gin, the aromatic spirit infused with the spicy pungency of juniper berries (among other botanicals). The name gin is derived from the Dutch word jenever, or perhaps its French equivalent genievre, the names for Juniperus communis in the respective languages. Schiedam, in South Holland, is particularly famous for its Genever (or Jenever) which has been made there for centuries.
