Grape or the Grain But Never the Twain?

Bottling, brewing and barrel-ageing – Cantillon’s grounds resemble that of a winery; brewmaster Jean Van Roy (centre) and museum tour guide Alberto Cardoso (bottom, far right)

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Bottling, brewing and barrel-ageing – Cantillon’s grounds resemble that of a winery; brewmaster Jean Van Roy (centre) and museum tour guide Alberto Cardoso (bottom, far right)

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The old adage about beer and wine not mixing is undermined by the succulent, sour lambics of Cantillon, some of Belgium’s most sought-after beers

BY JEFFREY T IVERSON

Brussels may be the beer capital of the world, but of more than 200 breweries that made the city’s quintessential, bracingly sour ale – lambic – before the First World War, only a single one remains, Brasserie Brouwerij Cantillon.

Today, some 45,000 visitors come annually to the brewery to discover essentially how ancient Egyptians once brewed (Cantillon is still fermented by wild yeasts) and to taste the brewery’s myriad blends, which are frequently ranked among the world’s 100 best beers.

Thousands of aficionados across three continents partake in the brewery’s annual Zwanze Day celebration, when kegs of experimental blends are tapped simultaneously in 16 countries. Flooded with demand, Cantillon must refuse more than 50% of export requests.

The irony of this success is that for much of the past three decades, Cantillon has had its back turned to the beer world.

Lambic and gueuze (a blend of aged lambics) were so outmoded when JeanPierre Van Roy took over the brewery from his father-in-law in the 1970s that he decided their only hope for survival was to embrace their antediluvian image and literally turn his brewery into a museum – Le Musée Bruxellois de la Gueuze – leaving it to others to make more consensual, modern industrial beers. The Van Roys carved their own path, and the company’s renaissance has largely been fuelled by inspiration they found in an entirely different world – wine. As Jean-Pierre’s son Jean puts it today, “Lambic is the missing link between the beer world and the wine world … and we may even be a bit closer to the wine world than the beer world.”

At once traditionalist and iconoclastic, Cantillon has become a living symbol of Belgium’s enduring beer tradition, while blurring beer’s very definition.

Ask Jean-Pierre what the most important meeting of his career was, and one might expect him to cite the late beer pope Michael Jackson, who offered Cantillon his highest “World Classic” rating; or perhaps Pierre Wynants of Comme Chez Soi, the first three-star chef to marry Cantillon with haute cuisine.

But no, Van Roy points to the day in 1986 when a Bordeaux winemaker named Pascal Delbeck, then director of Château Ausone, the Saint-Émilion premier grand cru classé, walked into his brewery. » DEPARTURES-INTERNATIONAL.COM

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Passing through, Delbeck had planned for only a brief visit. Then he started tasting. “I was astonished,” he recalls. “I recognised the character of the wines of Château Chalon or a grand Xérès (sherry), and discovered the phenomenal ageing potential of gueuze.” As Delbeck guessed, like sherry or Jura’s vin jaune, traditional lambic is an oxidative style, matured in the barrel under a yeast film that protects it. And unlike 99% of the brewing world, the Van Roys don’t use laboratory-selected yeasts. The wort (unfermented beer) cools overnight in an open copper vat in the attic, exposed to ambient yeasts and bacteria.

“I recognised that the story of JeanPierre and his lambic shared much in common with the story of a great wine,” says Delbeck. “As winemakers we use the yeasts which are naturally present in a vineyard, which transmit the terroir to create wines that are one of a kind – as Jean-Pierre does with lambic.” Delbeck founded the Union des Gens de Metiers in the 1980s, alongside artisan winemakers like Pouilly Fumé’s Didier Dagueneau, to stand in defiance against the same type of homogenising industrial techniques that transformed beer. In the combative, passionate Van Roy, Delbeck discovered an unexpected ally. Thus Van Roy became the only brewer ever invited into the 86

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exclusive winemakers’ club. The recognition by a community of likeminded professionals, after decades of lonely struggle, moved him. “I had to pinch myself,” he recalls. “But maybe it was the destiny of this brewery, and my destiny, to one day meet these winemakers.”

What’s certain is Cantillon’s beers have never been the same since. Already in 1973, after relaunching its raspberry lambic, or framboise, Van Roy decided to revive the centuries-old tradition of druivenlambik, or grapes lambic. Then in 1987, he renamed this wildly popular blend Vigneronne (winemaker) and hasn’t ceased blurring the lines between wine and beer since. Saint Lamvinus Cantillon is a lambic fermented in Bordeaux barrels with merlot and cabernet-franc grapes from Van Roy’s wine-growing friends in Saint-Émilion and Pomerol. Recently, Jean fermented 400 litres of lambic with carignan grapes from southern France, and a two-year-old lambic with riesling must from Alsace. His lambic soaked with Loire Valley pineau d’aunis grapes was sipped around the globe for Zwanze 2011.

The celebrated Jura winemaker Stéphane Tissot even give the brewery a precious vin jaune barrel, yeasts intact, to marry the aromatics of oxidative beer and wine. In 2005 they collaborated with famed

Austrian winemaker Willi Opitz, whose botrytised (noble rot) grapes from his ambrosial Beerenauslese Goldackerl wine were fermented with lambic in a cognac barrel to make the world’s first Botrytis lambic.

Many of these cuvées are so rare that beer collectors call them “white whales”, paying handsomely to acquire them.

When the Boston-based auction house Skinner introduced beer to the world of fine-wine sales in 2013, one 75cl bottle of Cantillon Don Quijote 2008 – a lambic fermented with Vitis labrusca grapes, 240 bottles made – sold for $1,600. Happily, such bottlings should soon become a little less scarce. For the first time in a century, the label expanded this year, purchasing a former lambic brewery just 300 metres away to double its barrel-ageing capacity.

It’s just another example of the inspired way the Van Roy family manages this cultural heritage site called Cantillon – one foot stubbornly in the past, the other defiantly in the future. As Delbeck says, in winemaking, like in brewing, “tradition is not only about the past”. Naturally, JeanPierre Van Roy agrees. “We want to respect the traditions and savoir-faire accumulated by our ancestors, without turning our backs on modernity,” he says, “for life always has something new to teach us.” cantillon.be. ♦

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A curated selection of lambics, gueuzes, faros and krieks – the brewery’s famed blends – and coasters from Cantillon’s enigmatic history