Alsace's wines defy its turbulent history

New Statesman​

22-05-2025

The taste of wine is the taste of fermented grape juice: diverse, distracting, shockingly beautiful. And there's more.
Wine's flavours, famously, can convey origin with great precision, though the mechanisms at play resist easy definition. Behind that, underwriting both our understanding of wine regions and the ability of those working in them to prevail on the market, lies history. History is wine's forgotten ingredient. Historical trauma may control commercial cycles (and with them the destiny of wines) centuries after an event. Alsace is the proof.
Alsace's fermented grape juice offers, in my opinion, France's finest value white wine. Our home staple is Alsace Sylvaner, produced by the Wolfberger cooperative: sappy, vinous, textured, affable with food, as refreshing as it is satisfying. It outclasses brittle Sauvignon Blanc and gestural Chardonnay from all other sources at the same modest price.
Alsace's greatest hillside vineyards will, within a century, qualitatively rival the Premier and Grand Cru white wines of Bourgogne. Alsace should be Burgundy writ large. The region's leading growers include some of French wine's deepest and most daring thinkers (notably Olivier Humbrecht MW of Zind-Humbrecht and Jean-Michel Deiss of Marcel Deiss), as well as its most fastidious craftsmen (such as Jean Boxler of Albert Boxler and the Faller family of Weinbach). Its two great merchant houses (Trimbach and Hugel) stand on the verge of exciting quality transformations – thanks to a new generation now prepared to embrace great single-site viticulture for its own estate wines. Alsace is almost ready to outgrow its history.
It had a slow start in Roman times (the Rhine, this far upriver, was less navigable for freight than at Koblenz and Köln). In the Middle Ages, though, Alsace came to rival Bordeaux: by now this was the Rhine's most significant vineyard zone, supplying Germany and England from Strasbourg, and Switzerland from Colmar. Then came catastrophe. The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) was chaotic and savage. This conflict killed perhaps 20 per cent of Europe's population, but a far higher percentage of Alsaciens. Marauding, half-starved bands of mercenaries roamed unchecked, firing villages and destroying vines and crops; corpses swung from trees. These decades brought ruin.
They also left a legacy of religious and political conflict that was to endure for 300 years in this much-contested zone. Imagine being born in Colmar in 1869. You never once leave the town; you die, 75 years later, in your natal bed. Yet you'd have changed nationality five times: French, German, French again, Nazi German and finally French. These are hardly the conditions under which a fine-wine culture can flourish.
The replanting of Alsace's vineyards after phylloxera (under the German empire) was grimly industrial – to protect the long-standing, high-quality viticulture of the Rheingau and the Mosel downriver. The region flaunted 30,000 hectares in 1828; by 1948, just 9,500 hectares remained. Its quality potential had been utterly squandered, enjoying no legal protection. Even the decree for the Alsace AOC, first ordained in 1945, languished in a legal wilderness until final adoption in 1962. The Alsace we know today began to take form with the elevation of the Schlossberg vineyard to Grand Cru status in 1975. Fifty years, but just 50 turns: winemakers only get just one chance a year to perform.
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Nothing is yet perfect, but improvements are accelerating. Dry wines are more common than they were and should now say 'Sec' on the label. The market is winnowing inadequate Grands Crus from the great historic sites that merit this status; growers are identifying their own parcellaires (single vineyards) within the overly large Grand Cru zones, and lieu-dit (unclassified named vineyards with a historical tradition) can be identified on labels, too. Riesling is better than it's ever been; Gewürztraminer still promises a gorgeously sensual encounter; fine blends are on the way back. Alsace's potential is, once again, what it was… in Shakespeare's day.
[See also: Why George Osborne still runs Britain]
Related
This article appears in the 21 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Britain's Child Poverty Epidemic