Anders Frederik Steen Bad Lighting Call you Later Merlot

Anders Frederik Steen and Anne Bruun Blauert make wine from “grapes and only grapes”. They have been doing this since 2013 when they first started buying fruit from winemakers they admired and making wine alongside legendary Jura vigneron, Jean-Marc Brignot.

Anders and Anne have now settled with their family in the beautiful village of Valvignères in the Ardèche and they grow grapes and make wine at their friends Jocelyne & Gérald Oustric’s farm, Le Mazel. It is a beautiful spot on the slope of a wide, open valley and the many varieties grown here thrive on a perfect mix of clay and limestone. The vineyards are full of life, having been tended organically for decades. In a previous life, Anne was a social worker working in prisons and caring for victims of sexual assault. Anders was both a chef and sommelier, working at the best restaurants in his native Denmark opening Manfreds and Relae. First, as a sommelier at Noma, This experience informs his winemaking in that he does not seek to follow rules and doesn’t feel the need to do the same thing every year. Instead, as he harvests he tastes the grapes and begins to imagine the kind of wine he might be able to make. It is a refreshingly logical, creative approach, and the results speak for themselves. Since the move to Ardèche, Anne has become fully implicated in the winemaking. Their wines are made from red grapes which are either pressed directly or destemmed by hand and white grapes pressed directly in a beautiful old wooden press. Any blending is done during the harvest and the different varieties always ferment together, spontaneously, outside under the open sky. The wines are bottled unfiltered, with no additions and are thoughtful, original expressions of this part of the Ardèche.

This is how Anders and Anne describe this cuvee - "90% direct press from Merlot and another 10% of grapes destemmed. The destemmed grapes were left to macerate in the juice for about a month. The first year the wine was in a fibre cuve, in the spring of 2022, we made a soutirage and transferred the wine to Demi-muid. Here it finished the fermentation and got rid of both reduction and mouse. Now it’s a light red, in the style of the Ploussard that we are all dreaming of."