Wine is dynamic. It changes. There are thousands of small-scale grape growers making interesting wine, people who produce only enough wine to supply a handful of restaurants and retailers. This poses a problem. If, like our protagonist Clément Klur, only three stores in the U.S. carry your wine, you have no "brand" for consumers to latch onto. Your product is essentially anonymous. Clément may have little desire to get bigger, but if, for the sake of my premise he were willing to grow the operation, quality might decline. There is only so much Clément Klur time in the week and only so many rows of vines available for sale in his hometown's Wineck Schlossberg Grand Cru, and those rows tend to change hands about every lifetime or so, give or take a generation. So to grow, people would need to be added to the winery staff, as would vines. Maybe he'd strike gold, improbably acquiring affordable and excellent parcels, adding to his quality domaine. But likely expansion would push Clément farther down the slope in search of available land.

Or, even worse, onto the flat plain. One of the real eye-openers from my trip to Alsace was how much acreage is planted along the highway, between outcroppings of suburban Colmar, next to vegetable gardens far from the Vosges mountains that form Alsace’s spine. Along the real route des vins, steep, sunny, sometimes almost inaccessible vineyard parcels ripen fruit that has made the reputation of Alsace over the course of centuries. These grapes have nothing in common with the fruit of the valley floor. Since Roman times, vignerons of Alsace have known this, but in the 20th century (damn you, previous century! How much viticultural carnage can 100 years create?) the lure of easy money, available due to the global popularity of Alsatian wines, and facilitated by the region’s embarrassingly high permissible yields per acre (highest in France, barring the highway-robbery yields of Champagne,) sent growers scurrying down from the hills and onto the plain. On a positive note, some winemakers who stuck to their principles were able to expand holdings in the hills, as these hard-to-farm sites were ignored in favor of machine-harvestable flat fields. An ugly story, but so it goes.

So growth can lead to changes in an estate's wine. Character fades. Not always, but sometimes. Klur is in the pretty village of Katzenthal, a town mostly destroyed by American bombs in 1944, but rebuilt in the region's traditional style. 500 people, 30 wine-growers, four restaurants. Tourism helps every grower here: we were joined for a portion of our tasting at Klur by a couple of Danes, who happily left with a carload of wine. Clément is an amiable, almost jolly host (not plump enough to be jolly), happy to discuss all aspects of his craft. The cellar encapsulates the philosophy here: built on an old, moisture retaining stone floor, the room is a circle, in keeping with the principles of biodynamics (and as a labor savings, as wine can be moved more easily from the periphery to center of a circle than it can be in more conventionally-shaped caves) One half of the cellar is lined with old wood foudres (all his "Klur" series of wines spend time in these) the other side of the circle is filled with stainless steel tanks. Clément showed us two parcels of vines. Kicking around the vineyard is an obligatory part of most winery visits, particularly when the proprietor is farming organically. Klur plows several times a year, and has a nifty machine to apply Rodolph Steiner-approved vine treatments. We looked at the machine, and the old vines (40+-year old Pinot Gris and Gewürztraminer) and took pictures of the century-old foudres. It was a lovely day to be in Alsace, a sunny, warm Friday at the beginning of May. New growth had begun three days earlier on the vines, but with the perfect weather, greenness abounded. Another winemaker (Mikael Moltes) told us later in the day that under these conditions growth would continue at a rate of 2cm/day! A blistering, almost watchable pace. At least as watchable as golf.

I’m pretty lazy, sadly, and was more than happy to ride in Clément's Volvo Cross-country from vineyard to vineyard. Wineck Schlossberg has a 1:10 grade, high above Katzenthal. It felt really freeing, invigorating to stand in the vineyard and look down on miles and miles of France, all the way to Colmar, and beyond. Not much later, when attempting to polish off a delicious but mountainous marc-flavored Kugelhopf at the end of a three-course lunch, I wished we'd walked. L'Agneau in Katzenthal does haute cuisine plus Alsatian fare, but apparently always in farmer-sized portions. For instance, a plateful of salmon carpaccio and paper-thin fresh asparagus. A healthy half-pound of beef cooked in Pinot Noir, garnished with spätzle and spring vegetables. This course brought out the best in an already enjoyable bottle of 2006 Klur Pinot Noir. The wine contains at least a bowlful of cherries. The feast ensured significant lateness to our next appointment, but halfway through lunch I ceased worrying about time. Food this good eases the way through life’s daily troubles.

So it may take a psychic leap on the customer’s part to buy "new" wines from little growers like the Klurs (they've been making wine for 400 years, but are still fresh and shiny in our marketplace). But the idea of brands is silly in the context of ephemeral wine. Constantly changing weather and new people in the cellar make wine closer in homogeneity to apples than automobiles, so while it requires faith and the occasional let-down, shopping from organic small-growers is far better than sticking to the well-known big brands. This approach offers a chance to taste real character (and true ripeness) instead of technically-correct industrial-size blandness. Small farmer wines bring joy to the whole thing for me, a commodity worth the extra detective work.

Rowdy Americans Crash Birthday Party for 70-year-old Alsatian Man
Lunch in Alsace, 2008


My family’s one-day intrusion into the Binner estate was the highlight of this year’s romp around eastern France. Joseph Binner was turning 70, and his son Christian and daughter-in-law Audrey organized a birthday party open to growers of natural wine and the hippies who buy it. So we showed up. A party itinerary including bullet points like “homemade sauerkraut lunch” and “discussion of making Marc (liquor) from Pinot Noir” reeled us in. Really the wines did most of the luring: American importer Jenny Lefcourt dropped by my office a few months in advance with a bag full of organic wines from around France, including show-stopping goodness from the Binner domaine. This estate may be the star in a portfolio that is brimming over with future stars. Jenny is as much fun to be around as any importer I know. She and her partner Francois have assembled a line-up of growers that seem to be actively avoiding the creeping global wine flavor hegemony. How many times a day does that sentence show up on sombebody's blog? Apologies. I slip into polemics occasionally. It's my bad side, or bad two-thirds. My point was, these wines are fiercely local. They actually do what so many estates pay lip-service to: they let terroir express itself. They believe in nature enough to give it the final say in the character of a wine. At Binner this means organic (obviously), minimal filtration, low sulfur, no tricks just solid traditional oenology. And the wines kick booty.

But back to the people. Christian took us on a walking tour of his steep vineyards and, in many instances, old vines. We were nervously sliding, glass of Riesling in hand, (hey, it’s a vacation, and a walking tour) down several of his slopes. Binner has an excellent slice of land in and around the Kaefferkopf Grand Cru, close to his home village of Ammerschwihr. I say it over again: stand with a guy like this in his carefully ploughed organic vineyard, see nature existing, then try to buy wine from the sterile chemical-rich field down the road. Wine tourism must help his cause- so much about wine is obvious on the ground. These steep slopes and their hand-harvested small amounts of fruit cannot be viewed as equivalent to machine-harvested tons of fruit from the fertile plain below. Maybe these wines should be relabeled Vosges wines, and the fruit from the river plain French Rhine wines. Some wall of distinction needs to be raised. So much contrast should not be sold under the same moniker. Since 1981 a group of Grand Cru sites have been selected, but this two-tier Grand Cru or plonk system doesn't tell the story, or really help consumers much at all.

We stayed for lunch, of course. Fat slices of delicious ham, a dizzying cheese tray, cake studded with Marc-soaked cherries. We ate at a long table in the winery; it was a noisy, wine-laden good time. It’s nice to be surrounded by a roomful of like-minded professionals once in a while, if only to recharge the batteries and reaffirm your belief in a message that still needs plenty of evangelizing. The night before they’d raided the cellar and stayed up past any reasonable bedtime drinking wines older than I am. Who can go to bed with thoughts of decades-old Riesling agitating the synapses? My family sat 20 kilometers south, roasting a local chicken and drinking wine made on the hill behind our rental house. Two days of partying with a 7-month-old in tow would have been too much, but, in spite of the awesome time in the winery and vineyard, maybe we picked the wrong day? Maybe every day is great at Binner. Maybe if I go Biodynamic, my life will be continually awesome. . . .