Anders Frederik Steen: Poetry Is Growing in Our Garden

Thoughts on wine-making and wine-drinking

In honour of the publication of the second volume in Anders Frederik Steen’s series We Never Fold the Same Origami Twice, we are reprinting Poetry Is Growing in Our Garden, the first volume in the series and a longstanding Apartamento bestseller. One of the cult figures in natural winemaking, Anders Frederik Steen started as a sommelier in his native Copenhagen—first at Noma, then opening Relæ and Manfreds—before starting as a winemaker in southern France in 2013. In the eight years since, Anders has filled notebooks: ruminations on what it means to understand (and misunderstand) wine, taste and pair it, leave the restaurant industry behind, where the balance lies between manual skill and abstract philosophy in a winemaker’s practice, and the technical minutiae of someone deep into his craft.

These are his notes on wine-making and wine-drinking, but they’re also the doubts and deviations of any learning process and the work that goes into forming any kind of practice. Over the years they show someone exploring the far corners of a discipline in order to come back to the thing itself and eventually grow with it.

The book opens with a foreword by French chef Pierre Jancou, whose restaurants, including Racines, Achilles, and Vivant, were among those to redraw the lines of Parisian dining in the early 2000s, pairing exceptional cooking with a wine list that completely eschewed added sulphites. The rest is divided into Anders’ day-to-day notes.

About Anders Frederik Steen
Anders Frederik Steen and Anne Bruun Blauert make their thoughtful and highly original wines from ‘grapes and only grapes’. They began making wine in 2013, sourcing fruit from admired growers and working alongside legendary Jura winemaker Jean-Marc Brignot. Today, the couple and their family are based in Valvignères in the Ardèche. Alongside their own vineyards, they harvest with friends Gérald and Jocelyne Oustric of La Mazel in Valvignères and with the Bannwarth family in Obermorschwihr, Alsace. Before wine, Anders worked as both a chef and sommelier in Denmark’s leading restaurants, first as a sommelier at Noma, later opening Manfreds and Relae.