Britt Karlsson #63
Discover wine tourism destinations all over the world with BKWine
Britt Karlsson co-founded BKWine AB in 2004. The company focuses on two main areas: wine writing and wine tourism (BKWine Wine Tours). Today, it is one of the world’s leading specialist wine tour operators. Britt and her team are based in Paris, France, but they are originally from Sweden.
In a typical year, BKWine Wine Tours organizes around 30 wine tours across the globe. France and Italy are the two main destinations, with most of their wine regions included in the itinerary. Other countries regularly featured in the BKWine Tours program include Spain, Portugal, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, and New Zealand. Britt has also occasionally planned and led tours to other wine-producing countries such as Croatia, Hungary, and Germany. The destinations vary each year.
Organisation of wine tours requires keeping finger on the pulse
Since founding BKWine, Britt has been instrumental in planning and organizing all wine tours, overseeing the logistics for hundreds of tours across a dozen or more countries. She personally conducts most of the tours, serving as the tour manager, guide, and instructor. Typically, in a year, Britt visits around two hundred wineries across approximately 20 different tours, guiding several hundred wine enthusiasts through various winelands around the world.
The double competence
This double competence of wine travel and wine writing results in Britt’s unique expertise in wine tours. This exceptional attention to quality and detail means customers return again and again. On a typical tour, more than a third of the participants are repeat customers.
What is a successful wine tour about?
For Britt, a successful wine tour is not about visiting famous-name vineyards, completing a wine celebrity “bucket list” designed for name-dropping back home. Instead, she strives to give the wine travellers (and wine lovers) truly unique experiences of a kind that is often impossible to do independently. Perhaps the most important aspect of a wine tour – at least according to BKWine’s and Britt’s travel philosophy – is who the visitor meets at the winery. Britt puts a lot of effort into assuring that in most cases the traveller meets the winemaker or the owner, or another key person involved in the business. In fact, it is the meetings with the people that stays in the memory for the traveller.
For Britt, visiting a winery is first and foremost something that should be a special and enjoyable experience, but it should also be something where you can learn a bit more, for example, why people use egg tanks, what’s the effect of barrel ageing, how you improve quality by pruning the vines, why and how is a winery “sustainable” etc.
On the wine tours that Britt organises, food always plays an important role. Many of the meals are enjoyed at wineries, sometimes with the winemaker participating at the table, at the chateaux and domaines that are on the programmes. A wine tour with BKWine is also a gastronomic experience.
