At a bar in Copenhagen’s Vesterbro neighbourhood, the drinks list runs to four pages and contains exactly one category: fermented. There is cider from Kent and Herefordshire. There is mead from a beekeeper in Jura. There is a fizzy rice wine from a small producer in the Noto Peninsula. There is kvass brewed from dark rye bread sourced from a bakery two streets away. And there is, somewhere toward the bottom of page three, a natural wine from the Loire that almost looks conventional by the time you reach it.
The bar is called Gjær — Norwegian for yeast — and it is one of a growing cluster of venues across northern Europe and the American northeast that are doing something quietly radical: treating wine not as the definition of fine fermented drink but as one member of a much larger family, deserving of no special precedence.
“Wine has had a monopoly on the conversation about terroir that it doesn’t entirely deserve,” says the bar’s co-owner, Astrid Lund. “A mead from a beekeeper who moves her hives seasonally across a specific landscape is as much an expression of place as a grand cru. A rice wine made from a single heritage variety grown in a single valley is as specific as anything from Burgundy. We just haven’t had the vocabulary for it.”
The vocabulary is developing fast. The natural wine movement of the 2010s created an audience educated in thinking about fermentation as process, as philosophy, as ethics — an audience willing to accept oxidation, volatility, refermentation in bottle, and other qualities that conventional wine criticism had taught them to regard as flaws. That audience has turned out to be extremely ready for what comes next.
What comes next is a generation of producers who trained in wine — at Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, at Gut Oggau, at Elisabetta Foradori — and then left to make things that weren’t wine. They are applying the methodologies and values of serious winemaking — indigenous yeasts, minimal intervention, obsessive attention to source material — to substrates their teachers would not have considered.
In Burgundy, a former négociant named Baptiste Girard makes mead from honey he sources within a 30-kilometre radius of his cellar, using equipment purchased from a retiring winemaker. He describes his meads in the vocabulary of wine — terroir, vintage variation, élevage — without apology. “The bees are doing the same work as the vines,” he says. “They are translating landscape into sugar. I am translating sugar into a thing you can drink and think about. The substrate is different. The idea is not.”
The regulatory picture is, predictably, complicated. In the European Union, mead, cider, perry, and kvass occupy different legal categories from wine, with different rules for labelling, production, and sale. This matters practically: a bar that wants to serve a rice wine from Japan alongside a Beaujolais faces different import categories, different tax treatments, different certification requirements. The producers, for their part, tend to regard this as both an obstacle and a liberation.
“We’re outside the appellation system entirely,” says Lund. “We don’t have to fight about what counts as a Burgundy or a Champagne. We just have to make something worth drinking and find the people who want to think about it.” She pours a glass of the Noto rice wine. It is pale gold, slightly hazy, with an aroma that is mineral and floral in a way that has no real wine analogue. It is delicious and entirely itself.
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