Wine Club Ansvar

This long-established site belongs to a group of wine-crazy Swedes, known as The Ansvar Tasting Group. In it you will find a vast collection of tasting notes going back to 1981, but not a lot else. The range and quality of the notes earns it a place in this book, however. The quality of written English is very good, the occasional oddity quite charming. The tasting notes are clear and concise.



The tasting notes are very consistent and full information is given on each wine, including price in kronor. I found the opinions expressed here to be very reliable.



Most pages are text-only so load speeds are good. The site uses simple frames with a navigation bar always visible down the left-hand edge of the screen linking to all the site's sub-sections.


SPECIAL FEATURES


Tasting Notes, 1995—2000 This is what the site is all about, with literally thousands of tasting notes presented in chronological order. The group scores each wine out of 20, and they usually have a theme for each tasting, such as ‘The wines of Greece', and ‘Chardonnay: Old World vs. New'. Everything is tasted, from everyday wines to the fine and rare. Often there's a summing-up of the tasting in the form of general commentary on the style of wine or region being featured.


Gallery What a jolly lot these Scandinavians are. Photos of the Ansvar club, all having a very good time and sporting a nifty line in Hawaiian shirts!

There's something very friendly and welcoming about this site that makes it worth a few minutes of your cyber-time. The repository of notes is useful and reliable and there's something on every page for a wine-nut to mull over.