Louis/Dressner Selections

New Producer: Yannick Meckert!

Yannick Meckert!

Tips For Navigating the Website.

How to navigate the website.

Desktop vs Mobile: We know people use their phones a lot, so we've worked hard on ensuring the site functions well on mobile devices. Having said that, we recommend using a laptop/desktop to optimally peruse our content.  Glossary: At its core, this has always been a website written for wine professionals *attempting* to glean information on the wines we import - and hopefully see a picture of the vigneron's dog. Since the jargon can be so technical, we've added an <glossary term="glossary" title="1427">interactive glossary</glossary> to the text for those unfamiliar with the baffllingly complex world of wine terminology. Even if you're a seasoned pro, you might learn a thing or two. And if you'd rather read the content without the glossary, simply head to the main menu bar and turn it off.   "Our Wines" Section:  In the "Our Wines" section, we've offered a variety of filter categories for you to explore and discover all the cuvées we import. These filters can be combined together to narrow down results. If you hit a wall with no results, simply erase one of the filters or clear all filters.  Technical Information For Each Wine: 78% of the wines we import have extremely detailed technical information when clicked on, dare I say the most technical anywhere on the internet. Half of these are probably woefully outdated. Search: If you know what producer or wine you are searching for, the search should quickly autofill what you need. Go ahead, give it a whirl. You can also hit enter after searching and skup the autofill. Hyperlinks/PDFs: Every single piece of content on the website has its own hyperlink. This means you can easily share a specific producer page, article, wine or filter combination with anyone. You can also save or print out PDF's bt clicking the PDF icon. Copy/Paste: Due to the website's design, if you need to copy/paste anything, the glossary needs to be turned off for the text to paste correctly. We recommend using the PDF feature instead.  Also, if you are going to straight up use our writing verbatim, PLEASE credit us when doing so. Seems obvious but we see it happen all the time.  A Shit-Ton of Written Content: The articles themselves can often be very long, and for this reason we developed a Propriety Pop Up System™ where you can easily scroll through various articles/wines and "pop out" to efficiently look at the rest of the content. We've tried our best to pack as many dog pictures as possible in there, but the digital ink has been spilled: the cumulation of decades' worth of writings from Joe, Denyse, Kevin and Jules is here for you to read. A huge part of the work with this new website was to find better ways to condense and extract essential information you need without getting lost in all that BORING text.  We still think you should check it out. Don't worry, there are plenty of pictures. And you might even find the writing interesting. Or funny. Or both.

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producer profile 05.06.2025

Yannick Meckert Producer Profile

Sometimes you just feel it: energy, connection, a point of view, singularity. From our very first exchange with Yannick Meckert, the way he communicated -open, thoughtful, detailed, attentive, philosophical- emitted a special energy. The rapport was immediate, first through emails, then a handful of hour-plus phone calls and finally a visit in the summer of 2024. By the end of that tour of the cellar and vines, it was clear that we would work together. I mean, how often do you spend over half an hour discussing the memetic illusion of expressing individuality through the consumption of instagram-approved agricultural products in urban centers? Or dissecting the philosophical merit of intentionally incorporating volatile acidity into your wines to create an “umami bomb”? Or, our personal favorite, spending the entire visit debating potential names for Yannick’s soon to be born daughter (it needed to be Alsatian, Denyse Louis proposed Liselle, which stuck. Liselle Meckert was born in November 2024.) What a trip! Yannick Meckert was born in a viticultural Alsatian family. An avid consumer of philosophy, his scholarly ambitions were initially stifled by the usual pressures and expectations of the countryside: helping out at the farm, taking over the estate… Reluctant, he eventually agreed to enroll in viticultural/enology school instead of pursuing a degree in philosophy. Yet within six months of returning to work with his father, he’d become totally disenfranchised with the chemical, artificial work in the vines. Unable to find meaning in this life and heritage, Meckert chose to pack his bag and leave Alsace. Setting out to create his own meaning and understanding of this métier, Meckert embarked in what would become a years-long pilgrimage, learning the ins and outs of every aspect of the wine industry, including restaurant and wine bar stints in Copenhagen and Tokyo. Of course the vines/wines were always calling, leading to many apprenticeships including Pax Cellars in California, Le Coste in Lazio, Phillipe Pacalet in Burgundy, Bruno Schueller and Patrick Meyer in Alsace amongst many others. From these experiences -Yannick scrupulously references specific examples that have directly influenced his viticultural and vinification philosophy- he produced his first independent vintage in 2019. Well sort of, because he was so unhappy with the wines that he decided to sell the finished bottles to a négociant who rebranded them with her own label. 2020, on the other hand, was magnificent! Knowing that rejoining the family estate was not possible, Yannick sourced three hectares of vines to rent as well as an unused cellar in the village of Rosheim. Working these vines and buying the equivalent of a hectare’s worth of fruit through the 2024 vintage, he’s produced various expressions of Riesling, Auxerrois, Gewürztraminer, Pinot Gris and Pinot Noir. In 2024, Meckert purchased 2.5 hectares of Riesling and Pinot Noir on steep coteaux he considers amongst the very best in Alsace. Two wines were produced from this land that same year, to be released “at some point”. From the 2025 vintage onwards, Meckert plans to forego his rented vines and make only two wines, a Riesling and a Pinot, for the remainder of his career. Before going any further, it’s important to note that Meckert comes from the “sentient terroir” school, entailing that man and his ideas are as much part of a wine’s composition as the soil, climate and vintage conditions (it’s also important to note that I just made that term up.) Keep this in mind because we are about to list a lot of left-field techniques you’ve likely never heard of anyone else practicing. Let’s start with cellar work, which is detail-oriented and intentional. From the beginning, Yannick made the choice to not use stainless steel as they trap electrons. Instead, he uses fiberglass tanks of various sizes -some tiny, some huge- for macerations and fermentations. Along with a few tronconic vats, Burgundian barrels, barriques and sandstone amphoras, he principally uses old, second-hand foudres purchased from Bruno Schueller and Claus Preisinger -some over 100 years old- for his elevages. For wines coming from schist soils, Yannick believes in “hyper-oxygenation”, letting his old foudres exposed to oxygen for three months at a time. In some cases, he will not perform ouillages either (ed note: for more insight on this technique and many of those described below, we highly recommend reading our separate article where Yannick elaborates on his techniques in great detail.) In balancing the terrestrial -what he defines as the vine and the earth’s production of minerality and acidity- to the cosmos: solar energy that will bring fruit, flower and aromatics, blending vintages has increasingly become a core tenet of Yannick’s philosophy. By blending colder, wet vintages with hotter ones, he hopes to "regain the balance that we've lost with climate change”. Likely the most polarizing tenet of Meckert’s cellar philosophy is the inclusion of acetic juices to intentionally bring volatile acidity into many of his wines. Dubbed his “umami bomb” or “imperfection as salt to beauty”, this can mean setting 5% the juices aside and blending into a larger vat when it begins to turn. Or adding unfermented juice during a partial fermentation. Or even letting the whole cuvée intentionally become volatile by overfilling it before racking it to old foudre. These techniques are applied by instinct and only in certain cases, except with Gewürztraminer where it is always used as it helps “tame the opulence” of the ultra-aromatic, often sweet wines resulting from this grape. White grapes are directly pressed or macerated depending on the vintage conditions. For reds, Meckert is partial to short “Jules Chauvet” whole-cluster macerations. Pigeages, usually one a day for whites and two a day for reds during a six to eight day period, are also the norm. Again, all of this is done by instinct and changes year to year, resulting in cuvées that vary in their grape composition, vinification, label art and cuvée name each vintage. In the vines, Meckert’s confluence of influences (confluinfluence?) is equally singular. The soil work, or lack thereof, is two-fold. On clay soils, “everything grows”, since these terroirs are “related to life”. Looking like a mystical forest, these parcels are never plowed and the grass never cut (nor are the vines, which grow high and rambunctious). But on stone soils such as schist, Yannick applies cover-crops in every row in order to “bring life where there is none”. In regards to vineyard maintenance, Yannick does not replace dead vines but rather extends thriving ones by only pruning one-year old woods in the same direction. “Vines are lianas. That’s what they want to be. Most viticulture prevents vines from being what they naturally are.” As Denyse Louis put it during our first visit, it’s a type of elevated marcottage, resulting in one very long vine producing fruit. According to Yannick, it also forces the roots of the vine to go deeper to feed themselves, leading to increased minerality. In our decades of visiting vineyards, this is the first time we’ve seen this type of system implemented. For treatments, Meckert has impressively managed to not use copper or sulfur at all in the vines certain vintages but will treat if he has to. Rather than sticking purely to the traditional copper and sulfur, he prefers using salt water and molasses to combat odium, and also likes to spray clay zeolites to bring electrons and “reduction” to the vines. No fertilizers are ever applied as the vines are very vigorous. Finally, we must discuss the choices in packaging. With often-poetic cuvée names related to human emotions or, in a couple cases, references to books and films that have moved him over the years, the labels vary from austere to pop-art pastiche, always with a self-referential sense of humor and sense of permeating mischief. In an act of rebellion, Meckert forgoes using the traditional slim and long Alsatian bottle shape in favor of Burgundian bottles and intentionally declassifies himself from the Alsace appellation, selling his entire production as Vin de France. While this may not feel particularly radical anymore in certain parts of France, in the context of Alsace it is all but unheard of: a true critique of the limits imposed by such a storied but inflexible viticultural region. Other, funner examples: -The estate’s logo, itself an ode to the pop art of Andy Warhol, is a reinterpretation of the Gauloises cigarettes logo with a grape bunch instead of a Gaul helmet. -The “label” of his first Riesling in 2020 was printed on scotch tape so that fancy restaurants would feel uncomfortable serving it. -Naming a wine “A L’Ombre des Jeunes Vignes en Fleurs”, knowing it would annoy sommeliers typing out their lists and surely look awkward on the page. -A recent run of cryptic labels looking exactly like Gallimard book covers (one of France’s biggest publishing houses): read me like a book! -“With French law recently adopting a new restriction forcing producers to add a QR code listing all ingredients on the label, I have decided to include another QR code next to it connecting to my website with a reference list of my anarchist ideas inspired by thoughtful researchers such as Proudhon or Bruno Latour. It's sort of a response to the state's obligations.” If this profile seems long-winded, it’s because we are very excited to be representing this estate. Yannick Meckert is the type of vigneron you only meet a handful of times in our line of work: one who reminds us, despite all of the hype and glam and bullshit that has occurred in the rise of natural wine over the last decade, that what we do in this little world is still very much alive and worth fighting for. Like Gianfranco Manca of Panevino, Tom Lubbe of Matassa or the late Julie Balagny, Meckert’s work challenges and questions conventions, ultimately seeking the answers necessary to forge a singular, deeply personal path. Philosophy as wine.  And look, we understand that may not be for everybody. But if the following text adorning each back-label even remotely piques your interests, we just might think you’ll dig it: “Imperfection is salt to beauty. I try to capture the energy, the elevation, the will of a place. To capture its essence for easy reading, to approach the yin and the yang, the terrestrial and the cosmic, the soul of a wine. To describe this wine through reason would extinguish it instead of feeling and drawing from its electrons.”

harvest report 05.12.2024

2024 Harvest Report from Eduardo Torres Acosta

Winter 2024 was not a very cold one and unfortunately without snow. This lead to the budding of the vines started earlier than in previous years. Some rain in Spring helped face the early summer months. We were very careful during the flowering in June, remembering how devastating it was in 2023 and fearing to find any spore of mildew. But the weather helped us in this sense, with a dry June and July followed by rains in August that led our plants to reach a good ripening.   The harvest started on September 14th with the red grapes: a week earlier than in previous years. We started from the lowest vines, continuing in elevation. It was the hottest harvest we've ever had, reaching up to 30 Celsius and leading to the driest harvest we have seen in all my years on Etna. The ripening was very similar between one vineyard to another: we harvested the grapes in Nave, our highest vineyard on October 4th, 15 days earlier than usual, finishing the harvest in just 20 days.   We can be satisfied with the production this year, with intense, deep reds. By incorporating a new vineyard planted in 2021, the Versante Nord Bianco will have a lower percentage of Minnella and more Carricante. We think that this will help bring more acidity to the wine.    In 2024, we were able to produce the totality of our cuvées, unlike in 2023 where we only produced Versante Nord Rosso and the two whites . <img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1024/4b/ba/4bbac2ef52f6326579f76dd7e8668886.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1024/49/7e/497e01ada4beb288f147b9164a0ab313.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1024/4b/87/4b8743fd5d9f4af50bc2b6914894505d.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1024/d6/02/d60277935bae5d7628bad37f5b3790ac.jpg" />