Anders Frederik Steen

Anders Frederik Steen and Anne Bruun Blauert are a Danish couple who left Copenhagen for the Ardèche and made their home in Valvignères. Anders worked for years as a chef and sommelier in Denmark, most notably at Noma, Relae, and Manfreds, where he also built and managed one of the country's first entirely natural wine lists and worked as an importer. Those experiences cultivated a detailed understanding of wine at table, and an equally firm conviction that the best bottles were made without additions.

AFS Aging a Wildflower on the Last Page of My Favorite Book 2013 is from their very first vintage. In 2013, Anders made wine at Gérald Oustric's cellar at Domaine Le Mazel in Valvignères, working with Ardèche fruit from Le Mazel and Alsatian fruit from the Bannwarth family in Obermorschwihr. His initial collaborator was Jean-Marc Brignot, the Jura winemaker who had been making wine without additions for years. Brignot left for Japan in 2015 and Anders continued independently.

Since then, Anders and Anne have grown the project steadily. They now farm approximately four hectares of their own vines in the Valgrand area outside Valvignères, planted primarily with Grenache varieties on clay-limestone soils. They continue to work with both the Oustric family in Valvignères and the Bannwarth family in Obermorschwihr, where Anders vinifies on-site in a dedicated cellar. His position is consistent: the cellar is part of the terroir and inseparable from it, and the wine is made from grapes and nothing else.

Every wine is fermented spontaneously, bottled unfined and unfiltered, and made without any additions. The cuvée names, drawn from song lyrics and poetry, change from bottle to bottle and vintage to vintage, as do the wines themselves.

Explore more Anders Frederik Steen wines at Primal Wine: Forever and Ever Child VDF 2023, Weightless Fingers, Should We Just Rely on Luck?, It's the Smell of the Pine Trees by the Sea that I Prefer, and Comme un Double-Vitrage. Discover more in our best-selling natural wines collection.