<p>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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Setting out to create his own meaning and understanding of this <em>métier</em>, 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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 (<strong>ed note: </strong>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.)</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the vines, Meckert’s confluence of influences (confluinfluence?) is equally singular. The soil work, or lack thereof, is two-fold. On clay soils, <em>“everything grows”</em>, since these terroirs are <em>“related to life”</em>. 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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>“Vines are lianas. That’s what they want to be. Most viticulture prevents vines from being what they naturally are.”</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Other, funner examples:</p>
<p>-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.</p>
<p>-The “label” of his first Riesling in 2020 was printed on scotch tape so that fancy restaurants would feel uncomfortable serving it.</p>
<p>-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.</p>
<p>-A recent run of cryptic labels looking exactly like Gallimard book covers (one of France’s biggest publishing houses): read me like a book!</p>
<p>-<em>“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.”</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Philosophy as wine. </p>
<p>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:</p>
<p><em>“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.” </em></p>
<p><em><strong>On working with oxygen in the cellar:</strong></em></p>
<p>Before starting to vinify Riesling by direct-pressing it, I took the time to taste many wines made on this type of terroir: that is to say hard soils such as granite, schist or gneiss. These geological formations, created millions of years ago by extremely high temperatures, were literally "cooked": the minerals and soils hardened at more than 1,000° at the bottom of the oceans, in the center of the Earth or during volcanic episodes. What happens at such temperatures? Minerals of the same family group together: mica with mica, feldspar with feldspar.</p>
<p>Let's imagine clay, a particularly chaotic soil found only on the Earth's surface. Why this exclusive location? Simply because clay represents minerals and organic matter decomposed by water and air, elements belonging to the living realm. It is teeming with bacteria and yeasts that can only decompose on the surface, precisely where water and air are found. It's comparable to our intestine: a living environment, fermenting and constantly decomposing.</p>
<p>Now let's take this clay and place it under pressure and heat equivalent to 1,000 tons per cm² and 1,000° temperatures like at the center of the Earth. What happens? It hardens to become schist. With even more pressure and heat, it evolves into mica-schist, and then finally into transparent garnet, just as limestone becomes marble. It then becomes hydrophobic and devoid of oxygen.</p>
<p>What should we understand from all of this? These hard soil compositions are associated with the non-living, such as space or the Earth's center and surface. They belong to the cosmos, like a solar summer in a cloudless July, under high pressure, diffusing its heat.</p>
<p>The opposite of this non-living world constitutes our habitat: the intestine, the planetary surface between 20 km above and 20 km below, where oxygen and water coexist. The terrestrial, the living, the water, the low pressure...</p>
<p>This is why vines were historically planted on hillsides: there is clay for the link to the living (growth, fermentation) and hard soil for the non-living (flower, fruit, aromatic, tannins, bitterness).</p>
<p>Is oxidation linked to oxygen and therefore to living things, to decomposition? A wine grown on clay oxidizes much more easily than a wine from hard soils, ones without affinities to oxygen. Moreover, a wine with volatile acidity, a "hardening" in a non-living process, can neither oxidize nor age well.</p>
<p>In the past, when fermentations progressed more favorably thanks to less sunny climatic conditions – with grapes tending towards noble gray rot rather than bacterial acid rot – these wines, having grown in a living environment, continued to evolve in the bottle, with oxygen beneficially continuing this evolution.</p>
<p>Another observation: even vines growing in clay soils tend towards horizontality by thickening, unlike vines planted in hard soils such as schist, which elongate more.</p>
<p>With climate change, wines are becoming too influenced by pressure and heat, adopting solar notes and exuberant aromatics, as opposed to humic and fungal characteristics.</p>
<p>So, quite simply, I practice oxidative aging in foudre for my white wines from hard soils: to extract them from their verticality due to their hydrophobic and oxygen-deprived soils, in order to open them up to life and fluidity.</p>
<p>The soil guides winemaking as much as climate: everything is linked. A rainy year will evoke clay through its connection to life, while an overly sunny year will evoke hard soil. The idea is to bring the opposite to create balance. In Burgundy, soils composed of clay and porous limestone require avoiding excess oxygen due to the risk of oxidation. In the Jura, the blue marls are reductive, hydrophobic, and devoid of oxygen: oxidative aging is therefore used.</p>
<p>Grape juice, undergoing organic fermentation, transcribes the climate and the soil, thus becoming their revealer. As you know: the page is the soil, the grape the ink.</p>
<p><em><strong>On his affinity for volatile acidity:</strong></em></p>
<p>Volatile acidity brings umami and is also a way for me to break out of the ever-perfectionist straitjacket imposed by the appellation and the social pressure of those who uphold good taste. Breaking out of it to bring charm, imagination and poetry, to thumb my nose at the wine that fits into the boxes.</p>
<p>Specifically with Gewürztraminer, I like to induce acetate during the maceration by filling the tank to the brim: the yeasts will react with the bacteria and the oxygen to develop the acetate, which will give a candy-like quality and a sensation of sweetness to the wine, characteristics that are perfectly suited to Gewürztraminer.</p>
<p><em><strong>On pigeages: </strong></em></p>
<p>The idea behind pigeage is to feed the dominant indigenous yeasts to develop day by day and overpower the bacteria. Temperatures rise naturally because of the energy created, and then I open the vat to release the excess carbonic aromas. Also, the rising temperature helps eliminate the tannin-protein association through flocculation.</p>
<p><em><strong>On blending vintages together:</strong></em></p>
<p>Every wine is defined by terrestrial and the cosmos. I define terrestrial as what the wine gets from the vine and the soil: minerality, acidity, drinkability. In constrast, I define the cosmos as qualities linked to solar energy: aromatics, color, depth, structure.</p>
<p>Vinegar is based on bacteria and botrytis on fungus. In such, vinegar implies death and fungus implies life: decomposition in contrast to fermentation. 20 years ago, there was no vinegar in the vines, only botrytis, and this is entirely linked to climate change. Pinot Noir, which I esteem is no longer adapted to Alsace and Burgundy, continues to turn to vinegar in the vines in solar years. </p>
<p>I've increasingly started to blend vintages a lot in order to regain the balance that we've lost with climate change. What I mean is that years that combine a rainy spring with a sunny summer are becoming rarer. So I've decided to blend a rainy year with a warm year to restore the lost balance of a season that was normal. This way, we find the depth, tannins, color, and aromas of a warm year, combined with the fluidity and minerality of a rainy year.</p>
<p><em><strong>On his one of a kind pruning technique:</strong></em></p>
<p>This pruning method comes to us from Marceau Bourdarias, a specialist in plant physiology. Many of his concepts are inspired by the work of Olivier Husson, an expert in oxidation and reduction. The fundamental idea is based on this principle: when a plant suffers a pathogen attack, it oxidizes and loses its electrons, causing a decrease in reduction and, consequently, increased oxidation. This phenomenon is observed during the treatment season with diseases such as downy mildew or powdery mildew, but also during the winter period with esca, which penetrates the plant.</p>
<p>This is why my interventions aim to reduce this oxidation by strengthening the reduction processes. For my treatments, I use bacterial fermentations enriched with zeolite that feed the leaf and plant with electrons, thus maintaining their reduction. This approach is similar to the probiotics that a patient absorbs to counteract the oxidation induced by cancer and chemotherapy. The longest-lived populations consume large quantities of fermented foods teeming with life, unlike pasteurized products which, having undergone pressure and heat, are devoid of vitality.</p>
<p>Applied to pruning, the principle remains the same. The vine can only heal on the cane of a one-year-old wood: in reality, it simply covers the wound using its tannins. On older pruned wood – two, three, or four years old – it is unable to close the wound, which remains gaping and vulnerable to attack. I therefore manage to constantly maintain the same pruning line and only cut on the wood from the previous year. This technique causes the plant to gradually lengthen and compartmentalize its reserves, giving the vine a sensation of growth, like a liana trying to reach the canopy.</p>
<p>Here is a quick resume of my thoughts and observations in regards to 2024:</p>
<p>When I think of Alsace in 2024, I think rain, rain, rain. It reminds me very much of 2021, what I'd consider a terrestrial vintage since the cosmos (the sun) was not there to affect the wines in any significant way. 2024 will produce wines with a ton of drinkability and minerality thanks to the rain, which mineralises and serves as a mediator. What we'll be missing from the cosmos (the sun) are aromatic qualities, color and in all likelihood depth. </p>
<p>There was little "vinegar" at harvest and we mostly faced botrytis issues (grey rot). Vinegar is based on bacteria and botrytis on fungus. In such vinegar implies death and fungus implies being alive: decomposition in contrast to fermentation but also water. 20 years ago there was no vinegar in the vines, only botrytis, and this is entirely linked to climate change. Pinot Noir, which I esteem is no longer adapted to Alsace and Burgundy, continues to turn to vinegar in the vines in solar years. </p>
<p>The wines have already finished fermenting (ed note: this was written in December), I did direct presses because the juices are full of vitality. I also did some soleras in the middle of fermentation with wines from last year to bring a bit of solar energy to the 2024 vintage. The biggest risk a wet vintage can face is oxydation, while solar ones is volatile acidity. </p>
<p>In the vines, it was an uphill battle, since rain equals fungus equals mildew. In the end, we did eight treatments with a base of clay, lactic bacteria, sulfur, copper... But also silica to counter-balance and favor flower and fruit through quartz (cosmos) since this was what was missing from lack of sun. For flower and fruit you need sun, for a healthy growth and development you need water.</p>
<p><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/a1/c2/a1c2fb1232db2c3b23349842740758b8.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/d0/01/d00123e9822099a65cdb958b09837e9c.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/90/c6/90c68d6a4b5b40dfae2ce77f28d46615.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/34/b3/34b3a1dd1fae18bf6b93320ba42b0eaa.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/2c/30/2c30d29a4fd90d39f990a09ea211d601.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/f4/5f/f45f4f43dbbc7dae448dfc1230971785.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/97/bf/97bf4e44a3f4e0b860e54ff2b0bff976.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/0a/c4/0ac44ea714cac210015d01879ac81c58.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/1e/ae/1eaef624af75fc2ccf31b6ef60edc4ac.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/8d/25/8d252174d6ef9b52b1750211cb024484.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/63/4d/634d02ff35d1a24249b4daa50e5eb846.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/ea/d7/ead754fd718c9fc2848ff8ba8b1381df.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/e4/50/e45065fa8794085bbb0133fb44ddd592.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/11/a4/11a421e354ce7ecfc4ba9eeda76638fd.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/23/f4/23f40702f8a69048b278da942df79792.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/4a/e2/4ae26c4934fa90236fd8e100240356b3.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/d5/12/d51234ce41fee73c549e3e145a22375a.jpg" /><img src="https://louisdressner.com/uploads/images/article//1042/02/dd/02ddc96edfbdfed1e987da11e8fcb194.jpg" /></p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Setting out to create his own meaning and understanding of this <em>métier</em>, 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!</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 (<strong>ed note: </strong>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.)</p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>In the vines, Meckert’s confluence of influences (confluinfluence?) is equally singular. The soil work, or lack thereof, is two-fold. On clay soils, <em>“everything grows”</em>, since these terroirs are <em>“related to life”</em>. 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”.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>“Vines are lianas. That’s what they want to be. Most viticulture prevents vines from being what they naturally are.”</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Other, funner examples:</p>
<p>-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.</p>
<p>-The “label” of his first Riesling in 2020 was printed on scotch tape so that fancy restaurants would feel uncomfortable serving it.</p>
<p>-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.</p>
<p>-A recent run of cryptic labels looking exactly like Gallimard book covers (one of France’s biggest publishing houses): read me like a book!</p>
<p>-<em>“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.”</em></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Philosophy as wine. </p>
<p>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:</p>
<p><em>“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.” </em></p>
<p><em><strong>On working with oxygen in the cellar:</strong></em></p>
<p>Before starting to vinify Riesling by direct-pressing it, I took the time to taste many wines made on this type of terroir: that is to say hard soils such as granite, schist or gneiss. These geological formations, created millions of years ago by extremely high temperatures, were literally "cooked": the minerals and soils hardened at more than 1,000° at the bottom of the oceans, in the center of the Earth or during volcanic episodes. What happens at such temperatures? Minerals of the same family group together: mica with mica, feldspar with feldspar.</p>
<p>Let's imagine clay, a particularly chaotic soil found only on the Earth's surface. Why this exclusive location? Simply because clay represents minerals and organic matter decomposed by water and air, elements belonging to the living realm. It is teeming with bacteria and yeasts that can only decompose on the surface, precisely where water and air are found. It's comparable to our intestine: a living environment, fermenting and constantly decomposing.</p>
<p>Now let's take this clay and place it under pressure and heat equivalent to 1,000 tons per cm² and 1,000° temperatures like at the center of the Earth. What happens? It hardens to become schist. With even more pressure and heat, it evolves into mica-schist, and then finally into transparent garnet, just as limestone becomes marble. It then becomes hydrophobic and devoid of oxygen.</p>
<p>What should we understand from all of this? These hard soil compositions are associated with the non-living, such as space or the Earth's center and surface. They belong to the cosmos, like a solar summer in a cloudless July, under high pressure, diffusing its heat.</p>
<p>The opposite of this non-living world constitutes our habitat: the intestine, the planetary surface between 20 km above and 20 km below, where oxygen and water coexist. The terrestrial, the living, the water, the low pressure...</p>
<p>This is why vines were historically planted on hillsides: there is clay for the link to the living (growth, fermentation) and hard soil for the non-living (flower, fruit, aromatic, tannins, bitterness).</p>
<p>Is oxidation linked to oxygen and therefore to living things, to decomposition? A wine grown on clay oxidizes much more easily than a wine from hard soils, ones without affinities to oxygen. Moreover, a wine with volatile acidity, a "hardening" in a non-living process, can neither oxidize nor age well.</p>
<p>In the past, when fermentations progressed more favorably thanks to less sunny climatic conditions – with grapes tending towards noble gray rot rather than bacterial acid rot – these wines, having grown in a living environment, continued to evolve in the bottle, with oxygen beneficially continuing this evolution.</p>
<p>Another observation: even vines growing in clay soils tend towards horizontality by thickening, unlike vines planted in hard soils such as schist, which elongate more.</p>
<p>With climate change, wines are becoming too influenced by pressure and heat, adopting solar notes and exuberant aromatics, as opposed to humic and fungal characteristics.</p>
<p>So, quite simply, I practice oxidative aging in foudre for my white wines from hard soils: to extract them from their verticality due to their hydrophobic and oxygen-deprived soils, in order to open them up to life and fluidity.</p>
<p>The soil guides winemaking as much as climate: everything is linked. A rainy year will evoke clay through its connection to life, while an overly sunny year will evoke hard soil. The idea is to bring the opposite to create balance. In Burgundy, soils composed of clay and porous limestone require avoiding excess oxygen due to the risk of oxidation. In the Jura, the blue marls are reductive, hydrophobic, and devoid of oxygen: oxidative aging is therefore used.</p>
<p>Grape juice, undergoing organic fermentation, transcribes the climate and the soil, thus becoming their revealer. As you know: the page is the soil, the grape the ink.</p>
<p><em><strong>On his affinity for volatile acidity:</strong></em></p>
<p>Volatile acidity brings umami and is also a way for me to break out of the ever-perfectionist straitjacket imposed by the appellation and the social pressure of those who uphold good taste. Breaking out of it to bring charm, imagination and poetry, to thumb my nose at the wine that fits into the boxes.</p>
<p>Specifically with Gewürztraminer, I like to induce acetate during the maceration by filling the tank to the brim: the yeasts will react with the bacteria and the oxygen to develop the acetate, which will give a candy-like quality and a sensation of sweetness to the wine, characteristics that are perfectly suited to Gewürztraminer.</p>
<p><em><strong>On pigeages: </strong></em></p>
<p>The idea behind pigeage is to feed the dominant indigenous yeasts to develop day by day and overpower the bacteria. Temperatures rise naturally because of the energy created, and then I open the vat to release the excess carbonic aromas. Also, the rising temperature helps eliminate the tannin-protein association through flocculation.</p>
<p><em><strong>On blending vintages together:</strong></em></p>
<p>Every wine is defined by terrestrial and the cosmos. I define terrestrial as what the wine gets from the vine and the soil: minerality, acidity, drinkability. In constrast, I define the cosmos as qualities linked to solar energy: aromatics, color, depth, structure.</p>
<p>Vinegar is based on bacteria and botrytis on fungus. In such, vinegar implies death and fungus implies life: decomposition in contrast to fermentation. 20 years ago, there was no vinegar in the vines, only botrytis, and this is entirely linked to climate change. Pinot Noir, which I esteem is no longer adapted to Alsace and Burgundy, continues to turn to vinegar in the vines in solar years. </p>
<p>I've increasingly started to blend vintages a lot in order to regain the balance that we've lost with climate change. What I mean is that years that combine a rainy spring with a sunny summer are becoming rarer. So I've decided to blend a rainy year with a warm year to restore the lost balance of a season that was normal. This way, we find the depth, tannins, color, and aromas of a warm year, combined with the fluidity and minerality of a rainy year.</p>
<p><em><strong>On his one of a kind pruning technique:</strong></em></p>
<p>This pruning method comes to us from Marceau Bourdarias, a specialist in plant physiology. Many of his concepts are inspired by the work of Olivier Husson, an expert in oxidation and reduction. The fundamental idea is based on this principle: when a plant suffers a pathogen attack, it oxidizes and loses its electrons, causing a decrease in reduction and, consequently, increased oxidation. This phenomenon is observed during the treatment season with diseases such as downy mildew or powdery mildew, but also during the winter period with esca, which penetrates the plant.</p>
<p>This is why my interventions aim to reduce this oxidation by strengthening the reduction processes. For my treatments, I use bacterial fermentations enriched with zeolite that feed the leaf and plant with electrons, thus maintaining their reduction. This approach is similar to the probiotics that a patient absorbs to counteract the oxidation induced by cancer and chemotherapy. The longest-lived populations consume large quantities of fermented foods teeming with life, unlike pasteurized products which, having undergone pressure and heat, are devoid of vitality.</p>
<p>Applied to pruning, the principle remains the same. The vine can only heal on the cane of a one-year-old wood: in reality, it simply covers the wound using its tannins. On older pruned wood – two, three, or four years old – it is unable to close the wound, which remains gaping and vulnerable to attack. I therefore manage to constantly maintain the same pruning line and only cut on the wood from the previous year. This technique causes the plant to gradually lengthen and compartmentalize its reserves, giving the vine a sensation of growth, like a liana trying to reach the canopy.</p>
<p>Here is a quick resume of my thoughts and observations in regards to 2024:</p>
<p>When I think of Alsace in 2024, I think rain, rain, rain. It reminds me very much of 2021, what I'd consider a terrestrial vintage since the cosmos (the sun) was not there to affect the wines in any significant way. 2024 will produce wines with a ton of drinkability and minerality thanks to the rain, which mineralises and serves as a mediator. What we'll be missing from the cosmos (the sun) are aromatic qualities, color and in all likelihood depth. </p>
<p>There was little "vinegar" at harvest and we mostly faced botrytis issues (grey rot). Vinegar is based on bacteria and botrytis on fungus. In such vinegar implies death and fungus implies being alive: decomposition in contrast to fermentation but also water. 20 years ago there was no vinegar in the vines, only botrytis, and this is entirely linked to climate change. Pinot Noir, which I esteem is no longer adapted to Alsace and Burgundy, continues to turn to vinegar in the vines in solar years. </p>
<p>The wines have already finished fermenting (ed note: this was written in December), I did direct presses because the juices are full of vitality. I also did some soleras in the middle of fermentation with wines from last year to bring a bit of solar energy to the 2024 vintage. The biggest risk a wet vintage can face is oxydation, while solar ones is volatile acidity. </p>
<p>In the vines, it was an uphill battle, since rain equals fungus equals mildew. In the end, we did eight treatments with a base of clay, lactic bacteria, sulfur, copper... But also silica to counter-balance and favor flower and fruit through quartz (cosmos) since this was what was missing from lack of sun. For flower and fruit you need sun, for a healthy growth and development you need water.</p>
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