Champagne Specialist
I trained first as a chef, with qualifications from Norway and France, before spending fifteen years as a sommelier: specialist wine bars, venues of my own, and fine dining at the highest level, including as Wine Director at Restaurant Maaemo, Norway's first three-Michelin-starred restaurant.
Today I am the managing director of Beverage Academy Norway, the first and only school in Norway accredited by the Comité Champagne to deliver the Champagne Specialist certification — a programme I lead as well as hold.
Tales of the Crayères is where I keep the rest of it. The crayères are the chalk pits beneath Reims, cut by Roman hands and later given over to wine — cold, dark, and slow. That pace is the one I've tried to give the journal.
Stories are the essays: on food and Champagne, on the season in the vineyards, on everything that won't fit inside a tasting note. Producers is an archive of the houses and growers behind the wines, each with its own village, soil and time in the cellar. Notes are the wines themselves — tasted, scored, given a drinking window and the context they were opened in. Notes are revisited as bottles change; nothing here is meant to be final.
Everything is tasted, and written, by hand. Nothing here is sponsored, and nothing is written to a brief.