Frédéric Simon Alexi Hobbs

On a sleepy 5.5-acre vineyard in Quebec province, in two steel tanks named “Fuck” and “Trump,” a wine revolution is quietly fermenting. This is the domain of Pinard et Filles. It’s far from the rolling hills of Tuscany and the famed grapes of Burgundy, but the compact rows of vines tended to by Frédéric Simon are having an outsize impact on viticulture. In some ways, the wine is as political as the vineyard’s brewing equipment suggests. Unlike the vast majority of wine produced around the world, Pinard et Filles’s stuff is natural, almost completely unmolested on its way into the bottle. It is grown without pesticides. If the wine tastes off, it’s not rescued with additives and chemicals, like at conventional vineyard; Simon would rather sit on a few hundred bottles of sub-par juice than sell it. For the first two years, he didn’t even use a mechanized tractor on his vineyard. (Hand-tilling is not, however, a requirement of natural wine.)

For Simon, a former wine importer and restaurateur, the Pinard et Filles project is not about profit. “The vineyard is more about an idea of life,” Simon says, “rather than about doing something to make money out of it.” Aesthete that he is, the design of Simon’s bottles are nearly as important as the stuff inside. Even though some cuvées only yield 96 bottles, each run gets a label designed by Canadian-born artist Marc Séguin. (Simon pays him in wine.) Every cuvée also sports a custom-colored wax top, which Simon and his two employees hand-dip at his kitchen stovetop. People have been known to collect Pinard wines for the labels alone.

In a province you won’t often see on a restaurant wine list, Pinard’s rise has spawned a phenomenon not unlike, say, the latest Supreme release. Every time the vineyard “drops” a new series of wines at one of the five liquor stores they sell to in Montreal, customers start lining up at 6:00 a.m., according to Simon, even if they are only allowed one bottle per customer. It is also available at a handful of restaurants and wine bars, but there’s a waiting list to get in on the distribution. “It’s really hard to get the wine,” Simon admits, not unproudly. Isaac Larose, the Quebecois designer, milliner, erstwhile street style star and natural wine enthusiast, discovered Pinard et Filles (where else?) on Instagram. Best known for his hat collection Larose Paris, Isaac is also the creative director behind a speakeasy and a natural wine bar in Quebec City. “I tried to get Pinard et Filles for my bars, and Simon never replied,” Larose says. “So I reached out to a really great sommelier in Montreal that was really well connected and asked if he could help me out, and he was just like, ‘nah.’”

Alexi Hobbs Alexi Hobbs

After a full year of searching, Larose was finally able to do a tasting of Pinard wines. The hype, he realized, was real. “It’s the kind of wine that you really think about the day after,” Larose says. “You want to re-try that taste.” (One of the reasons it’s hard to sample Pinard wines: the vineyard is not open to the public. “I didn’t spend any dollar to have a nice showroom and to have a girl or boy sitting there waiting for a customer who’s going to sip some free wine and then just gonna go,” says Simon.) Sensing a resonance between their respective brands, Isaac pivoted, and asked Simon if he’d be down to collaborate on a lookbook to celebrate the season’s Larose Paris x Missoni collaboration. “Our process is really similar,” says Larose. “Like us, they choose really specific stores to distribute their product, and get excited to work with specific people instead of choosing to do more.” This time, Simon returned his email. “I thought at the beginning he wanted to come with cute boys in suits,” Simon says. “And I was like, if you are looking for a really good surrounding, go to Tuscany!” Larose explained that he wanted to feature Simon and his staff; Simon explained that his two vineyard employees were a 55-year-old Bosniak and a 60-year-old Sicilian. “And he was like, alright, perfect!”