When I was a kid I lived next to a beekeeper who’d leave jars of honey on top of the side fence for us. These jars would sit there in the glaring sun, atop the fence, golden and fresh, and whenever I saw them glowing there I’d dip a finger straight into their warm, sweet, runny magnificence. I would also, every morning, slather this honey on my cornflakes. I did this for twenty years. When we moved from this house and indeed when the beekeeper died, I kept up the daily ritual of honey-on-cornflakes for another 20 years. Some time in my mid-to-late 40s I decided, finally, to cut out this daily honey intake. I lost ten kilos in three months. It obviously wasn’t the only change I made but honey was the beacon of that change. Shortly after I lost this weight I went to a lunch at Penfolds. Winemaker Peter Gago noticed my weight loss. He asked me how I’d done it. I refused to tell him for most of the lunch but he and writer Nick Stock kept at me. Eventually, I relented. Sheepishly, I said, I’ve cut out honey.

It was like saying that I’d been living my life as a little kid, and that I’d finally grown up. They found it funny, as did I. I kept this weight off for five or six years, and during these years, occasionally, when I’d see Peter Gago, he’d ask if I was “still off the honey”. It was as if I was a recovering honey-holic. I was.

The weight, I’m sad to say, has now slowly returned; I’m not skinny anymore. I saw Gago again this week and, politely, he commented that, you know, maybe I was on the honey again. Conversation quickly moved on but I wanted to say: I am because honey is home, and we can only stay away for so long.

There’s more to honey, than joy.

This is all relevant to this wine – L’Anglore Chemin de la Brune – in the most roundabout of ways. First, it’s made by a man named Eric Pfifferling, who is or was a beekeeper. My next door neighbour was a beekeeper for the honey but also because he was one of the most serious vegetable gardeners on earth. His whole block was covered in the growing of vegetables. The smell of cow and, more often, horse manure was almost a constant. Every time I jumped the fence to retrieve a cricket ball it was like stepping into a Narnia of cabbage, cauliflower, sunflowers and radish. This next-door neighbour did everything by hand; if he wasn’t gardening, he was welding, or sawing wood, or scrabbling beneath engines. Eric Pfifferling, who made this L’Anglore Chemin de la Brune and who I’ve never met, was or is also a mechanic. Because I’ve never met him, when I drink his wine I think of the wild hair and the wild tendrils of pea-vines of the next-door neighbour of my childhood.

L’Anglore Chemin de la Brune is grown the way my next-door neighbour would have grown it. Organically, growing and picking by hand, no sulphur, no added anything, fermented by the yeast whose culture has been developing there or thereabouts forever, on the trees and the flowers and the wings of the bees, and indeed on the skin of the grapes. A lot of wines are equally as natural, around the world, we all know, but this specific wine has become sought after. It has because it’s a good, interesting wine to drink, with more presence than is usual. It has too though because, to borrow from W.B Yeats, the centre has not held.

By this I mean that the centre of world winemaking has pushed the natural to the margin. Wine though is expected to be natural. It is, like honey, a connection to what’s real. If you leave a row of vines to fend for itself, wine of sorts will still happen, naturally, on the ground. Obviously any kind of dedicated winemaking is a long way from that but this essential truth remains a part of wine’s mystique. Wine is expected to be natural. When the making of wine drifts too far from this then, you could argue, it’s not just disappointing: something has let us down.

W.B. Yeats’ famous line: the centre cannot hold, is not just meant to be cute, or effective for its simplicity. The fact that the centre has not held, or cannot hold, is meant to be moving. It’s meant to be historically, deeply, terrifyingly moving. It’s meant to shake us. It is because if the centre cannot hold, and keep us safe, then what the hell are we meant to fight for, and to hold onto?

W.B. Yeats wrote this line in the aftermath of a world war that had slaughtered a generation. The centre for him related to the fundamentals of society, the institutions, rather than to the fundamentals of wine, or to wine’s institutions. The centre of his society – the institutions – had failed, and proven themselves not worth dying for.

Something that I love about L’Anglore Chemin de la Brune, in combination with its emblematic place in the world of natural wine, is that it’s a rosé. History has come to rest on a rosé. This would be frippery at its most absurd if it weren’t for the style of the wine itself. F. Scott Fitzgerald, if he’d tasted it, might have said that it’s neither within nor without. By this I mean that it sits between rosé and table grenache; it’s too light to be the latter, but it’s a world more than the former.

The 2021 version of this wine is not tannic, but it has feel to it, and weight, which makes it feel tannic or grapey in a delicate way. The colour is interesting too. Pale salmon, but rusty. There’s something about this pink-brown colour that says apples to me, apples in water, a crush of apples, red, yellow and brown, an orchard, not kempt. There’s something about this colour that is suggestive to me of a wild summer dream of a backyard, or to a series of such wild summers, or to sunburn on tanned skin. This wine is made with grenache and a couple of its varietal cousins, which play here as if they’ve known each other since childhood. I’m tempted to say that its appeal is for lovers of dry, earthen, spicy grenache but that’s not quite right. It’s further from the centre than that. I’m also tempted to say that L’Anglore Chemin de la Brune 2021 is for people who want to stop and think about a wine that has made others before them stop and think. But that’s not right either, even though the centre has not held, even though we’ve long-since slouched into Bethlehem, even though the winemakers of luxury brands are unlikely now to be beekeepers or mechanics.

This wine, L’Anglore, although not great in itself, describes an alternative to the mainstay of wine goings on, and does so in textural detail. It sits like a jar of honey on a suburban fence, defiant in the sun and indeed, catching it. Ultimately this wine is just itself, nothing greater and nothing lesser. It lives and it dies on the strength of its delicacy. There is then, in this wine, as there was in the mad neighbour of my youth, a grand humble defiant dignity.

This bottle of L’Anglore Chemin de la Brune 2021 was purchased off the wine list at Osteria Ilaria in Melbourne. It’s imported into Australia by Andrew Guard.

Credit to William Butler Yeats.

Campbell Mattinson writes for The Winefront.