Poetry is Growing in Our Garden (Book)

Poetry Is Growing in Our Garden is the first book by Anders Frederik Steen, and it is the best thing we have read about natural wine written by somebody who actually makes it. 564 pages, published by Apartamento, and very hard to put down once you start dipping into it.

Anders is Danish, he makes wine in Valvignères in the Ardèche, and he is one of the most quietly influential people in natural wine. Before any of that he was a sommelier in Copenhagen, he worked at Noma, and he opened Relæ and Manfreds. In 2013 he left the restaurant world and moved to the south of France to grow grapes. This book is what he wrote down while he worked out how.

Eight years of notes, not a manual

There is no system here and no step by step. What you get instead is the running record of somebody learning in public: how to taste, how to put wine with food, what to do when a ferment does something nobody predicted, and what it costs to leave a career you were good at. The publisher calls it a record of "the doubts and deviations of any learning process", which is the honest description. Anders changes his mind on the page. He contradicts himself. He writes down the things most winemakers only say after the third glass.

That is exactly why it works. Most wine books tell you what to think. This one shows you a person thinking, across eight years, and lets you land wherever you land.

The foreword

Pierre Jancou wrote the introduction, which tells you something about the company Anders keeps. Jancou is the French chef and restaurateur behind a run of Paris rooms that put serious cooking next to wine lists with no added sulphites, back when that was still an odd thing to do.

And the wines

Anders farms around Valvignères with Anne Bruun Blauert, and the wines are made with no added sulphur. The cuvée names run to whole sentences, the labels are hand lettered, and the bottles disappear off wine lists in Copenhagen, Tokyo and New York about as fast as they appear. The book is written in the same voice as the labels, just with room to finish the thought.

Who should buy this

If you already drink Anders Frederik Steen you will recognise the voice straight away. If you have never tried the wines, it still works on its own as a piece of writing about work, doubt, and making something with your hands. We have sold a lot of wine books. This is the one we go back to.

The details

564 pages. 125 x 195 mm. Softcover, black and white. Published by Apartamento. ISBN 9788409352180. English.

There is a second volume, We Never Fold the Same Origami Twice, which picks the story up in 2021. Both sit alongside the rest of our natural wine books, and his bottles, when we have them, are in the Anders Frederik Steen collection.

You can order this item (and any others in the Merch & Print section, not wine) to the EU, Norway, UK, Switzerland, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Thailand. Delivery cost is calculated by the overall weight of all items ordered.

When ordering this item with wine, it can only be sent to certain EU countries.

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