Anders Frederik Steen AFS Ce N’est Pas Mon Chien 2015

Ce N'est Pas Mon Chien — French for "this is not my dog" — is a red wine made from Grenache grown in Valvignères, a village in the southern Ardèche. The vineyards are farmed organically at Domaine Le Mazel, the property of Gérald and Jocelyne Oustric, where the clay and limestone soils have been worked without synthetic inputs for decades. The wine is classified as Vin de France, giving Anders the freedom to work without appellation constraints.

2015 was the first heatwave vintage Anders experienced as a winemaker, with temperatures comparable to the extreme 2003 growing season. To manage the richness of the fruit, he used longer macerations combined with a higher proportion of direct-press juice, pulling back on skin contact to preserve acidity. Red grapes are destemmed by hand; fermentation happens spontaneously with native yeasts, outside under open sky. The wine is bottled unfiltered with no additions of any kind, including no sulfur.

Anders Frederik Steen came to winemaking from the restaurant world in Copenhagen, first as a chef and then as a sommelier at Noma, where he helped shape one of the earliest fully natural wine lists in Denmark. He began making wine in Valvignères in 2013 with the Jura winemaker Jean-Marc Brignot. The 2015 vintage was his first made fully independently, after Brignot left to farm in Japan. He works alongside his partner Anne Bruun Blauert, who co-produces all the wines.

Because each vintage starts with tasting the fruit and deciding from there, no two releases are identical. The wine sees no oak aging, no fining, and no filtration. What goes in the bottle is grape juice fermented to completion by the organisms already present on the fruit and in the cellar at Le Mazel.