There is a particular sound a market makes when the people behind the tables actually made what is on them. It is slower. Nobody is closing a sale. Somebody hands you a small glass of something and then tells you, at length and without being asked, which bend in which road the fruit came from.
That is how I met PolyVin, on a Sunday at Grønt Marked on John Winthers Plads in Frederiksberg, in front of four bottles and a chalkboard with the prices written on it by hand.
What they actually do
PolyVin has been working since 2021 out of the old boiler room of the station building at Dyssekilde, north of Copenhagen. They mill, press and ferment local fruit into cider, fruit pét-nat, natural wine, mead, sour beer and vinegar. The fruit is hand-picked by them, sometimes with help from friends and family, from local orchards, from neighbours' back gardens, and — this is their own phrase, and I have not improved on it — from the scrub down at the bend in the road.
Nothing is added. Nothing is filtered. On their own website they note that this style of drink has collected a lot of names over the years, natural wine, zero-zero, low intervention, and then say simply: we call it PolyVin. They are now planting a vineyard and an orchard at a farm at Hågendrup.
Fruit picked in a neighbour's garden, pressed in a disused boiler room at a railway station. You cannot manufacture that, and you cannot scale it either.
The labels
What made me stop was not the drink. It was the bottles. Each label is an original painting, and no two are the same, so a row of them on a trestle table reads as a small exhibition that happens to be for sale. They told me at the stall that the paintings are the work of the founder's wife, and that every bottle carries a different one.
I am recording that as what I was told rather than as a verified fact, because it is not something their website states and I have not confirmed it independently. But it matches what is in front of you: you are buying a drink that somebody grew, pressed and then painted.
Why the market itself matters
Grønt Marked is a non-profit, and it says plainly what it is for: making local, fresh and seasonal food available to more people, and building a connection between the people who grow food and the people who eat it. It runs every Sunday from May to December, from ten until three, on four city squares — Gammelholm in the centre, Enghave Plads in Vesterbro, Skjolds Plads in Nørrebro, and John Winthers Plads in Frederiksberg. It is partly volunteer-run, and it takes new producers.
The economics of this are worth being blunt about. Buying a bottle here puts the money in the hands of the person who picked the fruit. Buying the equivalent in a supermarket does not. That is the entire argument for seasonal, local and direct, and it does not require any further philosophy.
Go on a Sunday. Talk to whoever is behind the table. Ask where the thing in your hand came from, and then let them answer properly, because that answer is the reason to be there.
How this story was made. Photographed on a phone at the market. Faces have been obscured. Nothing here is sponsored. The bottles were bought and paid for, nobody knew they would be written about, and no payment or product was received. Facts about PolyVin and Grønt Marked come from their own published material; the account of the painted labels is what we were told at the stall and is labelled as such.