This site exists because I came to coffee the long way round — through wine, through art, through a childhood in Provence and an adult life in Belgian horeca. I'm not a trained barista. I'm someone who grew up surrounded by vines and canvases, who opened wine bars and an art gallery, and who eventually discovered that specialty coffee asks exactly the same questions I've always found compelling: where does this come from? How does a place express itself in a cup? And what happens when you start paying real attention?

Raised among vines — Provence, then Belgium

My mother was a winemaker. She owned Château de Fontaine-Bleau in the Var, Provence — and my grandfather before her farmed the vines. I grew up between barrels, tastings and conversations about terroir before I could name what terroir meant. That early immersion gave me something I've relied on ever since: the ability to talk about complex beverages without needing to over-intellectualise them. Wine is tasted before it's described. I carried that instinct straight into coffee.

Three years in horeca — two wine bars in Brabant Wallon

Both venues have been covered by Paris Match Belgium, La Dernière Heure and Sudinfo. They became laboratories as much as bars: places where I watch what clicks with people, what starts a conversation, what makes someone rethink what they're drinking.

That's where specialty coffee became inevitable. A regular who drinks natural wine, tasting a well-extracted Ethiopian washed for the first time, recognises something. The same logic — origin expressing itself, precision revealing rather than masking, complexity rewarding attention — runs through both worlds.

Galerie Imperium — contemporary and street art, Brussels

Before the wine bars, I founded Galerie Imperium on rue des Drapiers 40 in Ixelles, Brussels — a space dedicated to contemporary art with a particular focus on street art and urban expression. The gallery exhibited JonOne, the New York-born artist whose work was covered by L'Echo in 2022, and brought together rarely seen archive pieces alongside new works. Running a gallery sharpened something that still shapes how I write about coffee: the discipline of presenting something complex to people who didn't know they cared about it yet.

Contributing writer — Paris Match (haute horlogerie, 2013)

In November 2013, I wrote a bylined expert piece in Paris Match France's Spécial Montres supplement on Roger Dubuis — the Geneva manufacture behind the world's only double flying tourbillon. The piece analysed the Poinçon de Genève, one of watchmaking's most demanding excellence certifications. Writing for a mainstream readership about a deeply technical subject — distilling precision without losing the reader — is something I've been doing across different worlds ever since.

Why expertcafe.be

When I started seriously exploring specialty coffee, I found two kinds of resources in French: surface-level lifestyle content, or hyper-technical forum threads for initiated professionals. Nothing for someone who comes from wine or gastronomy and wants to understand coffee with the same rigour they'd bring to a first growth. expertcafe.be fills that gap.

It's not a sales site. It's not a barista blog. It's an independent editorial resource for people who want to understand coffee — origins, methods, producers, flavours — with the same depth they'd bring to building a serious wine cellar. Everything here comes from tasting, reading, travelling and conversations on the ground. No sponsored recommendations. The only compass: what's accurate, what's useful, what actually changes how you think about your next cup.

The questions that obsess me

Specialty coffee is my main vertical on this site, but my fascination with complex beverages is wider: natural wine, Belgian craft beer, dark teas and oolongs, high-cacao chocolate. These worlds share a common grammar — terroir, care, attention — and I explore them all through that lens.

What I keep coming back to:

• The link between geographic origin and aromatic profile — how soil, altitude and process become legible in the cup
• Fermentation as a creative tool — anaerobic processes, carbonic maceration, yeast inoculation — and what they actually change
• The Belgian coffee scene — why Belgium produces world-class roasters and baristas, and how that excellence was built
• Coffee and food pairing — a near-virgin territory I explore directly in my venues

Get in touch

If you're a roaster, importer or event organiser working in Belgian specialty coffee and want to contribute to an independent resource — or if you simply want to talk over a glass in La Hulpe or Genval — reach me via the contact page. Press enquiries: [email protected]

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