Alsace

The region

Alsace runs for 120 kilometres, often under a kilometre wide, along the eastern foot of the Vosges — from a small outlying pocket near Cleebourg in the north, through Marlenheim opposite Strasbourg, down to Thann opposite Mulhouse in the south. A hundred and nineteen communes across the Bas-Rhin and Haut-Rhin départements fall within it, spread over a chain of sub-Vosgian hills cut by deep valleys, mostly between 200 and 400 metres of altitude.

Everything starts with the Vosges themselves. The range blocks Atlantic weather coming off the west, and that shelter is sharpened further, especially in autumn, by a foehn effect as the air dries out descending the eastern slope. The result is a pronounced semi-continental climate — cold winters, averaging 1.9°C in January, and hot, dry summers averaging above 20°C in July, with warm days and cool nights through ripening that vines respond to with more aromatic intensity. Colmar, tucked in the mountain's shadow, logs 1,800 hours of sunshine a year, and the vineyard as a whole gets only 500 to 650 millimetres of rain against roughly 2,000 millimetres on the nearby Vosges summits — enough of a gap to make the town one of the driest in France.

Underneath, the geology is a controlled mess. The Rhine graben collapsed along a north-south line and split the region with a dense network of faults, carving it into a mosaic of small blocks, each with its own soil and subsoil. The vineyard sits precisely on the fracture zone between the Rhine sedimentary plain and the crystalline Vosges massif, where erosion has reworked layers laid down across several geological periods: shallow, free-draining, slightly acid brown soils on Vosges schist, granite or sandstone; colluvial soils on alluvial fans and sandy-gravelly alluvium at the edge of the plain; and calcareous brown or rendzina-type soils on the sub-Vosgian hills, threaded with interbedded conglomerate and marl that hold water well. That variety, unusual for so narrow a strip of vineyard, is the whole reason Alsace has built a culture of naming individual sites.

The vineyard

Alsace is the great French exception: where almost every other appellation in the country is built around geography, this one labels its wines by grape. Seven varieties carry the bulk of production — Riesling, Gewurztraminer, Pinot Gris, Muscat (in its Muscat à Petits Grains and Muscat Ottonel forms), Sylvaner, Pinot Blanc (often interplanted with Auxerrois) and Pinot Noir, the only variety allowed for red and rosé. Chasselas survives as a minor extra. This variety-first identity is no marketing afterthought: the AOC's own specification traces it to centuries spent cultivating aromatic grapes to build a distinct identity, through the region's swings between being a southern outpost of the German Empire and a northern one of the French Republic.

The appellation's paper trail is precise. An expert committee for Alsace wines was set up by the ordinance of 2 November 1945, and the AOC itself was recognised in 1962. Alsatian viticulture has been managed since 1912 by the Association des Viticulteurs d'Alsace. The traditional bottle, a tall "Rhine wine" flute described in a 1955 decree and reserved to a small number of appellations by a decree of 1959, is still the norm, and since a law of 5 July 1972 — passed after 4,000 growers marched on Colmar — every AOC wine has had to be bottled inside the Bas-Rhin or Haut-Rhin, a safeguard against the loss of aroma that bulk transport over distance would otherwise cause.

The vineyard today covers roughly 15,000 hectares in production, farmed by around 5,000 holdings of very different sizes, organised into three professional groups: independent growers, cooperative cellars and merchant houses. Beyond the grape name, the appellation may be followed by a complementary geographical designation — Bergheim, Ottrott and Wolxheim among others — or by the name of a named site (lieu-dit), each carrying stricter production rules: lower yields, higher planting density, shorter pruning. It is that same variety of soil and mesoclimate that pushed growers to keep a wide palette of aromatic grapes rather than simplify down to a handful, since almost every one of them finds, somewhere on these hills, the exact ground it wants.

The styles

The specification sorts the wines into six types. Dry, mineral wines with taut, ripe acidity are generally linked to Chasselas, Sylvaner, Pinot Blanc (or Klevner), Auxerrois, Riesling and the two Muscats. Riper, fruitier wines with more dry extract are generally linked to Gewurztraminer and Pinot Gris — though these are tendencies rather than rules, since any of these grapes can, on the right site, land in either register. A white blend of several of them is sold as "Edelzwicker", descended from the medieval zwicker, a field blend of interplanted varieties that died out as a planting practice once phylloxera struck, even as the name lived on as a blending designation.

Above these sit the "vendanges tardives" and "sélection de grains nobles" wines, reserved for just five grapes: Gewurztraminer, Muscat à Petits Grains, Muscat Ottonel, Pinot Gris and Riesling. The mentions carry on a Germanic usage more than two centuries old, formally codified in 1984 at growers' own request. The grapes are picked by hand, often overripe, and must reach sugar levels well above the ordinary minimum — for Gewurztraminer and Pinot Gris, 270 grams of sugar per litre of must (16% potential alcohol) for vendanges tardives and 306 grams (18.2%) for sélection de grains nobles; for Muscat and Riesling, 244 grams (14.5%) and then 276 grams (16.4%). Minimum ageing is eighteen months. Yields, already modest for the base appellation (80 hectolitres per hectare for a white, 60 for a red), drop to 55 for vendanges tardives and 40 for sélection de grains nobles.

Pinot Noir, finally, stands alone for both ambitious reds and lighter reds or rosés sold under its own name or as "clairet" or "Schillerwein".

Reading a label

On an Alsace bottle, whatever follows "Alsace" or "Vin d'Alsace" is almost always a grape name — that is the one habit of mind that sets this region apart from every other French appellation. A complementary geographical designation or a named site (lieu-dit), where they appear, point to a more precise origin and stricter production rules. The "vendanges tardives" and "sélection de grains nobles" mentions, always followed by the name of one of the five eligible grapes, mark overripe wines whose sugar levels are guaranteed by the specification and which must carry a vintage year.

A separate appellation, "Alsace grand cru", covers 51 designations, each its own free-standing AOC named after a specific site — from Altenberg de Bergheim to Zotzenberg — recognised in successive waves between 1975 and 2007. Most allow only a single grape, chosen from Gewurztraminer, Muscat, Pinot Gris and Riesling; two of them, Altenberg de Bergheim and Kaefferkopf, permit a blend of several of those grapes in tightly set proportions, and one alone, Zotzenberg, admits Sylvaner alongside the rest. Planting density, vineyard management and yields are all stricter here than under the base appellation.