The Netherlands is a country in Northern Europe, often referred to as "Holland". The latter is the name of the former county in the western Netherlands where the key cities of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague are located.
Holland is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which includes Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, its overseas island territories in the Caribbean. To complicate matters further, the demonym for the Netherlands is "Dutch".
The country is bordered by Belgium to the South, Germany to the east and the Nordzee (North Sea) to the north and west.
Historically, the Dutch produced very little wine - the conditions were simply too cool and wet. A few pioneers established vineyards in the 1970s, and were generally regarded as eccentrics, both at home and abroad.
But viticulture has become increasingly viable due to Climate change.
The hot summer of 2018 produced the best wines produced to date, with record yields.
Today, the wines are gaining recognition at international wine shows. The most successful estates, such as Apostelhoeve in Limburg (one of the pioneers), are selling their wines rapidly. The sector benefits from a strong demand for cool climate wines.
Interspecific cross between Cabernet Sauvignon and a long-unknown grape variety - that would be Regent - obtained in 1991 by Valentin Blattner from Soyhières (Switzerland) and propagated by Volker Freytag (Germany). No resistance gene has been identified to either mildew or powdery mildew. Cabernet blanc can be found in Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Luxembourg, the Czech Republic, Italy, England, etc., but is still little known in France.
white wines from the region of Netherlands go well with generally quite well with dishes of rich fish (salmon, tuna etc), shellfish or mature and hard cheese such as recipes of baeckeoffe with fish, chinese fried shrimp ravioli or melt-in-the-mouth omelette with tomatoes, asparagus and comté.
On the nose in the region of Netherlands often reveals types of flavors of citrus, apples or minerality and sometimes also flavors of earth, tree fruit or citrus fruit.
