I don’t have time to take off my coat before Steve Beauséjour already pours me a glass of German Riesling.
The wine has the cloudiness of a failed urine test, but I’m not afraid. A few years of forest scouting strengthened my immune system and instilled in me a taste for adventure.
I listen…
No sound. I make a mental note: “Strangely quiet, for a natural wine… Maybe if I drink it quickly, I can surprise the bacteria in their sleep.” »
Nature enthusiasts, please stop shouting. If we can’t have a little laugh anymore, what’s the point of having invented wine? Besides, this is the other thing that I criticize about natural wine: we have no right to make fun of it. This jaw-dropping drink takes itself more seriously than a third-wave barista.
Fortunately, my host seems to have jubilant wine. If I came to this apartment in the Plateau on a winter evening, it was to settle once and for all the delicate question of natural wine… For or against?
“Not bad, but it doesn’t taste like Riesling, I think,” I said with false confidence.
“It depends on your idea of what it should taste like,” replies Steve Beauséjour, sommelier, importer and winemaking consultant. He is supposed to defend the “for”, whereas I would rather be against.
Let me introduce it to you a little.
“As a young child, I was intrigued by this fermented drink that adults drank and which made them happy and made them speak loudly. For me, there are aggressive alcohols, and there is wine, which is on the side of light, of love,” says Steve Beauséjour.
At 8 years old, on the day of his first communion, he took his first wine “brush”. He forever retained his love of wine, while his dreams of the cassock were abandoned. “My grandfather made wine without sulphites, with his Italian neighbors, who bought real grapes.
– Wait, I said to him, your grandfather made wine. Nobody said: “I make wine without sulphites”, that was not part of the speech – I know, my father also had an Italian friend and tried his hand at garage wine (this garage suffered a lot). »
He concedes the anachronism in the vocabulary.
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Steve Beauséjour has been fascinated by wine since childhood.
Still, since his first sip, he has sought to unravel the mystery of this drink. “It’s an obsession. I’m looking for how to put my feelings into words. But in my sommelier courses, I rather learned appellations by heart, what a particular grape variety is supposed to taste like.
“I like the idea of an appellation that claims a territory and a grape variety. But wine is above all human. In the same appellation, 30 winegrowers will give 30 different expressions to the same grape variety. I want to get closer to history, to make the links between humans, the soil, agriculture, breeding, bottling, time, and to be able to understand it in a drink. »
We agree. Long live the authentic, the handmade and the unadulterated. So far, no quibbles.
“What we are taught in books is that Cour-Cheverny must taste That. This is only true if we move towards standardization, and everyone follows the same parameters. But it’s not interesting. What does soil taste like? A grape should taste the land and the universe. »
The universe, the universe… So put that in a bottle…
He continues: “The vine is a wild liana, which seeks light, but on the other hand, the root system is also long. It will look for minerals, nitrogen. The more interventionist the winemaker is, mechanically, chemically, the more we lose, in terms of adding substances, the more we lose the origin. We’re moving away from it. »
This is where it gets tricky. Here we are at the heart of the debate.
“It’s a figment of ‘non-intervention’, Steve! It takes technique to make a good wine. It’s not enough to fire the pesticide company consultant. In the end, without intervention, without a good “intervention”, a wine becomes trivialized, and instead of being the expression of a fruit and a territory, it is a messy thing, grapes fermented in fuzzy identity, which can come from South Africa or Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, wrapped in a beautiful speech. Nietzsche spoke of those who muddy the waters of their thoughts to make them believe that they are deep. I often have the same impression with natural wine. There is a lot of bullshit that camouflages incompetence and improvisation behind the term “natural wine”. »
I threw down the gauntlet. Hostilities begin. I’m waiting for his reaction…
“I agree 100%! “, he said.
Well there… And the debate?
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Is the term “nature” overused and no longer means anything?
This is what I also criticize about natural wine: it no longer means anything. It has become an SAQ flavor tablet. Everyone is lost.
Steve Beauséjour, sommelier, importer and winemaker advisor
Besides, Steve, you will still agree: what is “natural wine”? To have “organic” certification, there are specifications, standards, rules. But what is “nature”? Anyone can claim it. This generally means: little or no added sulphites (because wine contains them naturally, by the way). It hasn’t even been 150 years since sulfur dioxide was added to stabilize wine, to prevent the proliferation of bacteria in the wine and its degradation into vinegar.
“It dates from the industrialization of agriculture,” summarizes Beauséjour.
Each country has set limits depending on the type of wine. The “nature” ones sometimes have no sulfur, sometimes a fraction of the permitted limits, 1%, 2%, 5%… Who knows. Because as much as traditional wines do not indicate the “recipe” nor the “ingredients” on the label, “natural” wines remain vague on this subject.
I ask Steve Beauséjour for his personal definition of natural wine. “It’s like plain yogurt. It’s nothing but grapes, no sulphites. It is grape juice fermented naturally, with its own local yeasts, without any other addition, and using healthy agriculture. »
He prefers to say “natural wine”. It is also not completely hostile to sulphites, without which foreign wines travel very poorly to us. He advises certain producers to use a minimum so that justice can be done to the product, which will be stirred, heated, cooled, forgotten, trucked on its journey from the estate to the glass.
“In an import system, it’s inevitable,” says the winemaking consultant. A wine poorly stabilized at the estate, sent in these conditions, will go in all directions. Bacteria destroy wines if we don’t intervene. »
“We should also stop using the term “natural wine”, which no longer means anything. What if we said: pure, free and precise? »
I was thinking more of “good wine”, but perhaps that’s too simple…
The real question, ultimately, is: do you want to drink it?
Steve Beausejour
I would add, as my friend Michel says: “I want to drink wine, not a speech. »
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Steve Beauséjour, sommelier, importer and winemaker advisor
Steve lets me taste Beau-Jus Blues, a wine from La Bauge, the Brigham vineyard for which he is an advisor. A unique blend of Frontenac Noir, a robust red hybrid, fermented on Gewurztraminer skins, to cut acidity and flavor. Out of the norm, off the beaten track, but not in the field at all. Good !
“We are still creating an identity. It’s not true that we know how to make wine in 40 years of wine history in Quebec. We’re still trying. We are stuck in old European references. We need to develop the Nordic side, acidic fruits. We are like children in a park without a guard.
— Are there sulphites?
— No: acidity is a natural antibacterial. We are incredibly lucky in Quebec!
“Careful when you say that, Steve, I’m not sure it’s a good selling point…”
Natural wine is the response to the industrialization and standardization of wine. “We wanted to generate yields at the expense of the health of the soil, plants and humans,” says Steve. But I am not dogmatic. I give everyone a chance. I want to understand.
“My former boss and mentor, Jean-Philippe Lefebvre (Rézin), told me: every great work deserves to be framed. [Voulant dire : il faut des sulfites pour protéger l’œuvre du vigneron.] I answer: but what if the frame harms the work? For me, additions can harm a work, and it stops living. It’s dead. Framing is beautiful, but framing is stifling. No one wants to drink a wine with 100 additions. Nobody says: I have a very good chemical wine, you will love it! »
He opens a wine from the Portuguese Baga grape variety, signed Filipa Pato. An explosive thing that doesn’t resemble anything, of which he describes to me the marine side, the notes of seaweed… I point out to him that it is a little closed.
“The wines don’t open quickly, we’re coming out of the full moon.
— Steve, things were going well, our business, let me go with the full moon! »
PHOTO MARTIN CHAMBERLAND, THE PRESS
Would we have common ground?
I’m not dogmatic either, Steve. Marcel Lapierre has been making “natural” Beaujolais for 50 years without annoying everyone.
When a wine refuses to take a shower, when you have to declare having visited a farm in the last 14 days when going through customs because you took a sip, I don’t care about the quantity of sulphites.
“We don’t like drinking good vinegar disguised as wine either,” he says. Nor when it tastes like mice or peanuts. But it has to ignite us. If it goes out, it’s not correct. And what turns me off is what’s armored, it’s what has too many additions. But I agree, it’s ridiculous, the naturals on one side, the conventionals on the other. Nobody can be found there. Afterwards, everyone has their own tastes. »
Before leaving, he insists, we open one last: another nested appellation, this time from Italy: a posca bianca, from Federico Orsi, where several vintages mix in the same bottle. It’s different “. But that’s what we like, the difference, right?
“Do you fit in well?” he asks me, all smiles.
— Yes, Steve, it fits well.
— That’s all that matters in the end. »
Cheers, Mr. Beauséjour.