For years everyone has been saying Alsace is having a come back. Well, after tasting a whole bunch of the Valentin Zusslin wines with proprietor Marie Zusslin, it’s official: Alsace is back! Gone are the... Read More

For years everyone has been saying Alsace is having a come back. Well, after tasting a whole bunch of the Valentin Zusslin wines with proprietor Marie Zusslin, it’s official: Alsace is back! Gone are the flabby, floral and overly sweet wines of yesteryear. These wines have verve, freshness and, above all else, an overwhelming sense of terroir.

The sister-brother team of Marie and Jean-Paul Zusslin knew what they wanted to do from the time they took over 20 years ago. However, it’s taken a while for them to actualize those ideas. With over 300 years of history at their winery, it’s not surprising that change wasn't instantaneous. The bones for greatness were all around them though.

The siblings inherited the gorgeous vineyards of Bollenberg, Clos Liebenberg, and the Grand Cru of Pfingstberg just outside of Orschwihr, packed with limestone and sandstone soils. Even better, these vineyards had all converted to biodynamic viticulture back 1996. All they needed to do now was produce wines the modern market demanded and convince the world that the Alsace they knew was not the only Alsace that could exist.

Alsatian wines were markedly sweet and floral starting in the 70’s and 80’s and until rather recently, due to wineries chasing market trends and defaulting to personal old-fashioned tastes. Marie was clear with us that this was not her style. In fact, Marie’s father had named an off-dry cuvée for her when she was a young from a parcel of Muscat, a fact that shocks her friends. “He thought of me as his flower, but I am actually a rock.”

Marie told us that when they made the decision to adopt completely dry styles across all the Zusslin wines, the only way to achieve this was through complete fermentation. This might not be a big deal for wineries that inoculate their wines, but at Valentin Zusslin fermentation has been spontaneous since 1691. This can often mean that fermentations run long, sometimes up to 2 years to ferment dry! But this is also the key to why their wines are so intensely terroir driven. According to Marie, terroir has more to do with the indigenous yeasts that populate their vineyards and cellar than it does with the mineral composition of the soil or vineyard exposition.