Ep. 24: Sune Rosforth of Rosforth & Rosforth

05/02/24 • 31 min

There's a lot of interest for wine in Denmark. Since we haven't really been a wine producing country, [people are] eager to really go deeply down into what wine is. - Sune Rosforth

Sune Rosforth is the head of influential Denmark wine importer Rosforth & Rosforth, which he founded in 1994, initially concentrating on wines from the Loire valley. Half-Parisian on his mother’s side, he hitchhiked around France as a young man and struck up what became a lifelong friendship while working for the family behind Anjou estate Château de Passavant. Cellar visits Rosforth conducted in the region alongside Passavant’s François David would form the nucleus of his initial portfolio, which also notably included the celebrated Saumur-Champigny wines of Clos Rougeard.

Since the early 2000s, Rosforth has expanded his company’s portfolio to include many key natural wine estates in Catalonia, Italy, Chile, Georgia, and beyond. In 2012, spurred by conversations with Olivier Cousin, he began conducting regular shipments of wine from Brittany to Denmark via sailboat. To a large degree, Rosforth’s free-thinking work as an importer (and later, as a restaurateur in his own right) has accompanied - and helped shape - Copenhagen’s emergence as arguably the world’s premier nexus for natural wine and forward-thinking dining. Today, both Rosforth’s office-slash-dining-room-slash-wine-bar-and-wine-wholesaler site beneath Knippelsbro (colloquially known as “Under the Bridge”) and Den Vandrette, the nearby wine bar run by his wife Veronica, represent a spontaneous, informal, and thoroughly vital contrast to the city’s renowned fine dining scene.

I first met Rosforth in 2020 over lunch at the home of Gard vigneron Alain Allier. Later we were reintroduced in Copenhagen by then-Noma-sommelier Mads Kleppe, and I’ve since had several occasion in that city to enjoy Rosforth and Kleppe’s supreme hospitality. (This includes Rosforth’s own thoughtful and daring cooking at the office, where he whips up, with little advance warning, dishes like shrimp in tomato-shrimp broth, or sautéed sheep testicles.) We recorded this episode in October 2023 in the Kulturtårnet (or Culture Tower) overlooking Knippels Bridge, a site chosen more for its sublime view than its amenability to sound recording. Take a listen for Rosforth’s take on the future of Clos Rougeard; his memories of Catalonian vigneron Joan Ramon Escoda before the latter began making wine; and his heartfelt apology for the intensity of his fellow Danes in Copenhagen bike lanes.

Aaron

FURTHER READING & LISTENING

Ep. 25: Anders Frederick Steen Ep. 26: Martin Ho of Pompette

Podcast Series III: Les Emigré(e)s - Expat Natural Winemakers in France, Part I Podcast Series III: Les Emigré(e)s - Expat Natural Winemakers in France, Part II

Podcast Series II: Contemporary Paris Natural Wine, Part I Podcast Series II: Contemporary Paris Natural Wine, Part II

Podcast Series I: Paris Natural Wine Lifers, Part I

There's a lot of interest for wine in Denmark. Since we haven't really been a wine producing country, [people are] eager to really go deeply down into what wine is. - Sune Rosforth

Aaron

FURTHER READING & LISTENING

Ep. 25: Anders Frederick Steen Ep. 26: Martin Ho of Pompette

Podcast Series III: Les Emigré(e)s - Expat Natural Winemakers in France, Part I Podcast Series III: Les Emigré(e)s - Expat Natural Winemakers in France, Part II

Podcast Series II: Contemporary Paris Natural Wine, Part I Podcast Series II: Contemporary Paris Natural Wine, Part II

Podcast Series I: Paris Natural Wine Lifers, Part I

Previous Episode

Ep. 23: Mathieu Lapierre of Domaine Lapierre

I was thinking of when I was really young, five to ten years old, at primary school, [of posters that were] just to explain to us the cycle of a tree, or a flower... I wanted to take that kind of academic way of presentation to explain carbonic maceration to people. - Mathieu Lapierre

Mathieu Lapierre is the co-manager, along with his sister Camille, of famed Morgon estate Domaine Marcel Lapierre, which he has overseen since the passing of his father in 2010. Initially a chef by training, Mathieu Lapierre joined the family estate in 2004 after viticultural studies in Beaune. Few who have met him in his two decades at the estate fail to remark the breadth of his interests, which also include the piano, archaeology, and Legos.

The occasion for our chat in early January was the completion of a pet project he first mentioned to me several years ago: an educational poster about the process of carbonic maceration. I may just be the target audience for this sort of thing, but I suspect Lapierre’s finished poster has an impressive potential to improve the global wine conversation, which remains rife with inaccuracies and mistaken impressions where it concerns carbonic maceration.

It is a situation that persists simply because questions about carbonic maceration most often arise in wine shops, wine bars, and restaurants, where informed staff are often too hurried to effectively explain the process. In such a way, Lapierre’s new poster is an inspired marriage between message and medium: it offers, in the form of a handsome poster illustrated with watercolors by French cartoonist GAB, information that is helpful on the wall of a wine establishment. Check out the podcast for a history of carbonic maceration; the sociopolitical values embedded in its practice; and the link between carbonic maceration and aged meat.

Aaron

This is a free episode of the NOT DRINKING POISON podcast. For access to all the episodes - plus years of vigneron interviews, profiles, news reports, and commentary - please subscribe!

FURTHER READING & LISTENING

Eloi Gros: An Homage to Vanishing Beaujolais-Villages

BOOK REVIEW: Jacques Néauport, Le Dilettante

Podcast Series III: Les Emigré(e)s - Expat Natural Winemakers in France, Part I Podcast Series III: Les Emigré(e)s - Expat Natural Winemakers in France, Part II

Podcast Series II: Contemporary Paris Natural Wine, Part I Podcast Series II: Contemporary Paris Natural Wine, Part II

Podcast Series I: Paris Natural Wine Lifers, Part I Podcast Series I: Paris Natural Wine Lifers, Part II

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit notdrinkingpoison.substack.com/subscribe

Next Episode

Ep. 25: Anders Frederik Steen

Winemaker in English is a stupid word, because I don’t see myself as a maker of anything. I mean, we pick the grapes, we press them, we leave them to macerate; of course we do things. So we make stuff. But the wine? If you see the period of time where we actually work the grapes... Let’s say we work the grapes for six or seven weeks. Then it’s in barrel for four or five years. - Anders Frederik Steen

Anders Frederik Steen is a Danish vigneron-négociant based with his wife and collaborator Anne Bruun Blauert in the southern Ardèche village of Valvignières, where the couple established a winemaking practice throughout the 2010s with the aid of Ardèche natural wine progenitors Gérald and Jocelyne Oustric of Domaine du Mazel. Today the couple farm almost 6ha of viognier, sauvignon, grenache blanc, grenache noir, portan, syrah, and serine, supplementing it with an almost equal volume of grape purchases from Domaine du Mazel and from Alsace vigneron Stéphane Bannwarth. In 2021, Barcelona-based interiors magazine Apartamento published a very lightly-edited volume compiling seven years of Steen’s tasting observations and notes-to-self, entitled Poetry is Growing in Our Garden.

Steen’s charmed career in natural wine began in 2007, when he worked at Noma under pathbreaking Swedish natural wine sommelier Pontus Eloffson (and alongside another Swedish sommelier Ulf Ringus, now a partner in Sweden natural wine importer Vin & Natur). Steen left two years later to partner in influential Copenhagen restaurants Relae and Manfred’s, a time when he also began importing natural wine to Denmark. His winemaking practice began in 2013, in what was initially envisioned as an ongoing collaboration with the influential radical natural winemaker Jean-Marc Brignot, who at that time had recently left France for Japan. Their partnership lasted three years, by which time Steen had already begun to base himself in Ardèche, drawn by the sense of community and camaraderie surrounding the Oustrics at Domaine du Mazel. Steen and Blauert began farming their own parcels in 2017; today the couple live with their two children in center of Valvignières, where they are in the midst of renovating their own cellar after several years vinifying at Domaine du Mazel.

Although we’ve traveled in similar orbits for many years, it wasn’t until harvest time at Domaine du Mazel 2019 that I first encountered Steen outside of the context of a natural wine salon. And it wasn’t until January of this year that we finally found an occasion to chat and taste some wines together, on an unseasonably spring-like morning before the Montpellier salons. Check out the episode for Steen’s peculiar writing process (it involves text messages); which winemaking techniques he learned from Jean-Marc Brignot; and his dastardly scheme to ensure the couple’s wines take up as much layout space as possible on restaurant wine lists.

Aaron

This is a free episode of the NOT DRINKING POISON podcast. For access to all the episodes - plus years of vigneron interviews, profiles, news reports, and commentary - please subscribe!

FURTHER READING & LISTENING

Ep. 24: Sune Rosforth of Rosforth & Rosforth Ep. 26: Martin Ho of Pompette

A long interview with Anders Frederik Steen and Anne Bruun Blauert by Madeleine Willis in Apartamento.

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