The first time I tried a wine by Anders Frederik Steen was at Wine Stand Bouteille, a natural wine bar in Tokyo around the size of a large closet, with space for just six people to perch on stools around a tiny bar. Sitting behind the bar was a bottle with an intriguingly understated label simply reading Come walk with me and wonder a little—and I was enticed to order a glass of the Grenache Blanc based on that poetic invitation alone. It was a celebration of everything I love about natural wine—a juicy, slightly funky nose with bright acidity and a light spritz.

I did some research while savouring a second glass and soon discovered that Anders was something of a legend in the natural wine world. A former chef-turned-sommelier, he has put together wine lists for some of the world’s most renowned restaurants, including Copenhagen’s Noma. Driven by a desire to find wines that shared a similar philosophy and would pair with the precise flavour profiles of the food at these restaurants, he began importing natural wine to Denmark. By 2012, he was curious enough about winemaking to team up with nomadic wine producer Jean-Marc Brignot, and before long he was living in the French village of Valvignères in the Ardèche, producing wine with his wife Anne Bruun Blauert.

When I returned to London after my trip to Tokyo, I picked up a few more bottles by the duo—and each one was as wildly imaginative as the last. Pure magique pas des chimiques was exactly as advertised on the bottle—pure magic without chemicals essentially—a juicy blend with a little barnyard character; Searching for the space monkey was an easy-drinking glou-glou style of rosé with a little bit of everything harvested in 2018; and then there’s La femme a qui?, a pet-nat crafted from a blend of apples along with Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes that comes together to create a dreamy, summery sparkling that’s not quite cider and not quite rosé.

There’s something alchemical about the way Anders and Anne make wine. In Anders’ words, he makes wine with “grapes and only grapes”—but, I believe there’s also a touch of magic. I was thrilled to be able to chat with Anders recently about his wines, and the philosophy behind his production.

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Mandi Keighran: How would you define natural wine?

Anders Frederik Steen: For me, it's very simple: natural wine is wine where nothing is added or removed. We harvest the grapes manually but, for me, natural wine doesn't change if you harvest with a machine. What does change the wine is if you use pesticides, don’t grow organically, or if you add enzymes, sulphur, conventional yeast… all these things that can help a wine go in a certain direction.

I even think [the term] “natural wine” is a little bit stupid because it's just clean wine, it's just grape juice. It should be the other wines that have another name. The term “conventional wine” is even more stupid, because conventional means it's the way we’ve always made it, and we haven’t always made wine like that—sulphur wasn’t used in production before the Second World War. It's only really recently that we started to add all these chemicals and pesticides. When we make wine, it’s more about the winemaking decisions than us making decisions.

MK: How did you discover a love for natural wines?

AFS: Back when I was an apprentice sommelier at Noma, we worked a lot with what we called organic or biodynamic wines. At that time in Copenhagen, we didn't talk about natural wine in the same way we talk about it today, but it was the same style of wine—no sulphur, no filtration, and the same philosophy. We discovered that the expression of this wine fit better with the food we were serving, which was very simple in the way it was composed with few ingredients. This demanded an equally focused wine. For me, natural wines are more focused than conventional wines—they are brighter and they have a palate that is bigger in a way, with many more flavours.

For us, it was also important to be as responsible when sourcing wine as we were when sourcing ingredients. We wanted organic wines, without anything added or removed because it was aligned with the way we were working in the kitchen. It was logical to not have conventional wines where they use pesticides or other evil stuff, because it was not what we wanted to serve our guests.

““By thinking about wine as cooking, you can really reach for the flavours and structure that you like in every year.””

— Anders Frederik Steen

MK: What led you to make the transition from sommelier to winemaker?

AFS: As a sommelier, I travelled to Italy, France and Spain to visit other winemakers and began to learn more about winemaking. I then opened two restaurants with some friends from Noma [Christian Puglisi’s Relæ and Manfreds, both sadly closed by the time this article was published] and also an import company to bring natural wine to Copenhagen.

The knowledge about how to make the wines was growing with me—and one winemaker told me that he thought that I should make wine myself. It became an idea that stuck with me. In 2012, I started to have a discussion with winemaker Jean-Marc Brignot, and we started making wine in 2013. Soon afterwards, we split and I continued to make wine with Anne.

With my background as a chef and sommelier, I was curious about the process of how the wines were made. What was affecting the flavours? How did the manipulation affect the final wine? How could we do as little as possible and interact in a small way—and how would it affect the final product?

MK: I love that you describe vinification “like cooking, seasoning a sauce, making a vinaigrette or mixing a salad.”

AFS: We see a lot of change from vintage to vintage—that's why this analogy works for us. A vegetable in spring doesn’t have the same flavour as the vegetable in autumn or summer. It’s the same with grapes, but it’s not the seasons, it's the vintage that is changing. Some vintages change the taste for the better and in others, the flavours are a little less interesting. You need to be able to interact with that. By thinking about wine as cooking, you can really reach for the flavours and structure that you like in every year. The vintage will change, but you have the same direction. I find that super interesting.

When we process the grapes, we follow their flavours, but we want them to have a certain structure. So, if we feel the grapes are lacking acidity, we add another kind of grape that carries more acidity; or if a certain grape has too much richness or a lack of structure, we blend them with grapes that have the components that we are missing. It's complicated to explain because it's driven by intuition and feeling, like cooking. You taste an ingredient, and immediately you know if it needs some lemon juice or salt. There is no recipe to follow—it has to be something that you taste. Winemaking is the same.

MK: Can you tell me more about working with apples to create La femme a qui?

AFS: We wanted to make a sparkling rosé, and we had a cuvée that was fermenting very slowly that we wanted to use to make this pét-nat [where light fizz is achieved through refermentation in bottle]. The same year, we wanted to try to make some cider from apples and the area, so we also had apples fermenting. We were tasting the juice regularly because when you do a sparkling cider or wine, you have to bottle it at a very specific moment when the sugar level is correct and the flavour is in place.

We went away for the weekend and planned to bottle the cider the day we got back. When we came back, though, it had fermented too fast and all the sugar was gone. We had a choice to either bottle the [cider] without any bubbles or to mix the two cuvées—they went really well together, so we decided to blend them. So, it was really a coincidence.

MK: How do you and Anne approach making wine together?

AFS: People often think it’s only me making the wine, but it’s important for the way we make our wine that we are the two of us. We can never do things alone—the more we work together, the better we are. I believe people should stop thinking so much about themselves and focus more on being together.

MK: It’s like the name of your wine—We can do what I can’t.

AFS: That's exactly what it's about. The name of that wine is an analogy for what we do here in our village. It’s also what we think should be done in every country, at high-level politics, micropolitics, the building you're living in, and the community. People need to be together. We are social people and we should be more social because it's better that way.

MK: You’ve recently finished the harvest for this year. How was it?

AFS: We finished the harvest in Ardèche a couple of weeks ago and we're about to finish the work in the cellar. We work with the grapes and juice every year during harvest—after this moment, we never touch the wines again until we bottle them. 2020 was both a very normal year and a very unusual year. Normal in the way the grapes were performing—they were ripe at a good moment, there was a good volume, and good structure and balance—but unusual in that the harvest started two or three weeks before normal because of a very early spring.

This means we harvested when it was really warm and the skin of the grapes had a hard time to ripen at the same time as the juice. At our vineyard, we decided to try to push the harvest to the latest possible time in order to have a very ripe grape. So, 2020 wines from our hands will be higher in alcohol and more concentrated in the flavour of the fruit. They will be less acidic, less fragile and richer, more “serious” wines.

Some of the grapes we harvested earliest are lacking a little structure but have a very beautiful acidity, so we mixed these grapes with some of the last grapes that were harvested. Again, it’s like cooking—we took the acidity and fragile structure from the first part of the harvest and mixed it with the later part that was richer and more structured.

MK: Each wine has a different name—even if it’s from the same plot but a different vintage. Why is this? And, how do you come up with such poetic names?

AFS: Every wine is representative of a single moment in our life—even if it’s the same grapes from the same plot, every year is different. Therefore, when we started to make the wines we decided that every wine should be called something different. Anne and I want to take ourselves a little bit away from the wine, so it’s not the wine of Anne and Anders, but a specific wine with a specific name. We give the story of the wine to the wine itself, where it belongs. It’s a way to give freedom and liberty to the wine drinker to relate to the wine in their own way.

Each name is a discussion between Anne and I on a very personal level. Sometimes it’s small, poetic lines that we find funny or beautiful in conversation. Other times, it’s politics or things we think are important to discuss. It’s an easy way to express ideas that we think people should think about and to take these ideas from newspapers and television and get them to the table where people are talking. Often a sentence that has a certain meaning for us, has a completely different meaning for someone else. And that's also the beauty of it—you transform the meaning of the name into what you need it to be.

““Every wine is representative of a single moment in our life””

— Anders Frederik Steen

MK: And how do you match each name with a wine?

AFS: Some of the wines have names for a very long time before they get bottled—it's a relationship with the wine and the way it evolves. We bottled two wines in Alsace in 2015, for example, one made from Gewürztraminer and another made from Pinot Gris. The wine made from Gewürztraminer was taking a long time to finish fermentation while the Pinot Gris was fermenting quite well and finished quite fast.

One of the winemakers there said, “You guys need to understand that some birds travel from one point to another and it takes five seconds, but big seabirds travel from the European continent to the American continent and it takes five to six weeks—they just fly and fly but eventually they will land on the other side.” For us, it was logical this cuvée should be called Oiseau de Mer, which means “seabird.”

At the same time, the Pinot Gris was a comfort—it was like when you feel insecure, you go home and take your blanket and lean back in your favourite chair to comfort yourself. And this cuvée was giving me this comfort. I felt that I was leaning back in time to comfort myself that everything would be alright—one wine was already good, and the other wine would be good at some point, I just needed to wait. So, we named this wine Leaning back in time. These wines had these names for one or two years before we bottled them. It’s often like that.

In 2018, we made another two wines that had names quite early. One of them is called In the shadow of the morning sun. It’s one hundred percent Grenache Noir from a vineyard where the morning sun goes behind the peak of a mountain—so we are working in the shadow of the morning sun. We listen to all the birds and insects going crazy as it’s becoming morning, but it is still so quiet where we are. It became the way we talked about these grapes. It’s a similar story with Come walk with me and wonder a little.

MK: That’s actually the first wine of yours that I tried—can you tell me more about it?

AFS: It is one hundred percent Grenache Blanc, which is a grape that I always find complicated when I taste it from other winemakers. Sometimes it’s really good and sometimes it’s less interesting. We were trying to figure out what causes this variation and, by talking with other winemakers, we discovered that it’s the moment of harvest as it’s a grape that loses acidity quite fast. From the moment where it's tasting good and there is a good balance between acidity and the richness of the grapes, until the moment where there's no acidity and it's only very heavy fruit is only a matter of two or three days. So, we did the most logical thing—we went to the vineyard every morning and every evening to taste the grapes and to follow what was going on.

I couldn't figure out what we should do or how we should do it. Anne had the same feeling and we were both lost in our own reflections. So, I asked another winemaker that we've worked very closely with to come and taste the grapes and give us his point of view. It was in the middle of harvest and everybody was stressed out, but he made time. He said, “Let's go have a walk and reflect a little bit”. And, that gave the wine its name.

MK: I’ve also always wondered what the meaning is behind Searching for the Space Monkey?

AFS: That's a very funny story—that’s one of the wines we never thought much about. We made a rosé but we never thought much about it. We were planning to put it in a bottle the next day and still didn’t have a name. Eventually, the name came from a conversation about space rockets going out into the skies in the 1970s and ’80s and the Russian space rockets had monkeys and dogs on board—we wanted to know where are all these monkeys and dogs now? We were laughing saying we should go look for them. Out of a stupid, ridiculous conversation we got this name. It was like this mission that we should go find them because they got lost out there.

MK: The natural wine movement is growing quickly—what are your thoughts on the future of the movement?

AFS: The mission for me is simple—we need everybody to eat organically, drink organically, and to take responsibility for being more sustainable in every way. So, if restaurants are using natural wine because it’s trendy, that’s fine by me as it means we will have less of these chemicals in nature. Honestly, I don't care if people are drinking wine with sulphites or not. What really matters for me is that they take political responsibility with the money they use. By choosing organic and biodynamic, you take responsibility—just like when you choose not to wear sneakers made in China using child labour. It’s equally bad to buy products that are grown in conditions that kill nature because you want to save money. It means we destroy the planet.

We cannot change things by having big conventions where we tell countries to behave in a specific way and to farm in a special way—but if people don’t buy their products any more, then they are going to change. Ten years ago, sommeliers in fancy restaurants said natural wine tastes like shit because it’s all natural yeast, it’s full of funny flavours, and it’s dusty wine that’s not filtered and clear. Nowadays, they work with natural wine because they know that is what their clients want.

MK: Do you think natural wine will continue to become even more mainstream?

AFS: Yeah, for sure! It’s like with chicken. As more people bought organic chicken, the prices went down and more people could afford it. We need natural wine to get into supermarkets, and we need producers who are capable of making big volumes at an inexpensive price. We need everyone to drink this. For us, it’s not possible as we don’t have the capacity to make more wine than we do—around 15,000 bottles annually. I’m not good in volume and I don’t have that knowledge. But there are people who are good at this, and they need to go ahead and do it. That’s the way we need to make revolutions in the world—with the small things every day.