The Berivagus History – Bernhard´s Story

The founder and winemaker of Berivagus, Bernhard Smedberg, grew up in Stockholm, Sweden in a family that worked in the wine industry. Already at four years old he visited the champagne region for the first time meeting big personalities in the champagne trade such as Christian Pol Roger and having dinner at the Rèsidence de Trianon.

His entire childhood and teenage years were filled with travels to wine regions for wine tastings and wine dinners. Of course, tasting of huge variety of wines during family dinners in his native Stockholm was also part of the upbringing! As he was underage majority of these were obviously discovering the bouquet rather than the taste.

At 18 years old the interest grew since Bernhard was now allowed to fully enjoy the variety of wines in his own glass. At the same time, he started working for the family business importing wine educating sommeliers at restaurants about the portfolio of the wines that the family imported.

Bernhard worked with this for a few more years before starting his own company as a wine journalist and wine cicero. He was organising tastings and wine trips – trying as much as 400-500 wines some weeks! These five years were extremely intensive, and Bernhard felt a need for more focus within his wine world.

Due to his reputation as outstanding and personal wine expert he was approached by a champagne house with an offer of collaboration. After trying some very nice cuvees Bernhard started working for this champagne producer as an assistant winemaker and product developer with extensive client contacts. It was in this role he really started making wine and not only knowing it! He knew from the outset that this was something he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

So, when a few years later family friends of Bernhard approached with an opportunity to make his own champagne from five small vineyards in Grand Cru in the heart of Côte des Blancs in the village of Les Mesnil sur Oger it was like a dream coming true! The vineyards are of exceptional quality and family friends allow Bernhard to use their winery for pressing, making and storing the champagne – Berivagus was born!

Bernhard created Berivagus first vintage in 2022 – buying 12 oak barrels second-hand from Burgundy, harvesting his first grapes and creating his very first own champagne! The brand was launched officially in June in 2023 with the Collaborations series and we are waiting for the first Originals to ready earliest 2025.

The Berivagus Philosophy

Every Berivagus bottle should taste and smell exceptionally well – we aim to be world’s best champagnes. This requires listening to the wine, to the terroir and the vintage to balance the wine so it shows itself from the absolute best side given the conditions each year.

In our opinion the long-term trend in champagne has been to harvest too early and to add too little sugar – this was meant to make fresh and elegant wines. Now it is a trend among grower’s to use later harvested grapes and oak barrel maturation to create more complex and interesting wines.

Bernhard saw a clear trend in most other wine regions – all wines really sought after and admired by wine critics, sommeliers, wine collectors and himself have three things in common;

• they are powerful wines with plenty of taste
• they are complex wines carrying a lot of different aromas
• they are balanced

The first two of these qualities are quite easy to achieve with late harvest, usage of oak barrels and adding more sugar. The third one is the hard to combine with the two first as we wish to keep the freshness of the wine.

So instead of harvesting early and just adding sugar to balance that acidity we do the opposite (late harvest) to try to build us powerful and complex wine as possible and then aim to keep the freshness of the wine in the wine making process after pressing.

Wine making of Berivagus

It all begins with the grapes! The grapes used for making Berivagus Originals come from five parcels in Cotes des Blancs – which make up a total of 0.32 hectars. Three of them are located in Les Mesnil sur Oger which are Les Carelles, Les Musettes, Les Haut Voies and two of them in Oger which are Les Belles Voyes, Les Plantes d´oger.

The age of the wines differs widely between the plots – the two oldest are planted in 1961 and 1966, one is middle-aged – planted in 1984 and the two young vineyards were planted in 2010 and 2015. This makes up a good mix of young and old vineyard to create the powerful and balanced champagnes we are after. Since we harvest as late as we possibly can, we are happy to have some young vines, since they contribute with more freshness to the wine. The older vines bring more intense flavours like spices, sweeter fruit and caramel. We mix grapes from all plots for Berivagus Original.

We harvest late – we want a lot of hang time to create more and powerful aromas – slightly less acidity and higher sugar content then then the general harvest in champagne delivers. However, given this we try to keep as much freshness as we possibly can. We achieve this by harvesting the grapes as cold as possible – so we start very early in the morning and press grapes that are less than 20° warm. Pressing cold grapes results in a slightly higher acidity than warm – since you need to press them a bit longer and harder. We believe that this enables the balance we are after despite the late harvest.

After pressing we ferment the wine in stainless steel tank at 13 degrees for approximately 20 days – a cold and slow fermentation. This again to keep the freshness and to get as much aroma as possible out of the wine. Most of the time we do not practice malolactic fermentation but may do depending on what the wine shows. All these steps make it possible to build maximum power and complexity in the wine and keep its freshness.

After the fermentation we put the wine into oak barrels to rest for approximately 6 months. We believe this period gives the wine more complexity and breadth without the risk for “over-oaking” and killing off the freshness.