Coming from an old family of winegrowers living in Bergheim since 1744, Marcel Deiss chose the profession of arms at 18 and left his native land. Returning to the country after the Second World War, he rediscovered his roots and, with his son André, developed his small property holdings into a dynamic wine company: DOMAINE MARCEL DEISS was born.
Today managed by Jean-Michel Deiss, the Domaine operates 27 hectares of vines spread over 9 municipalities and around 20 km of Côte Viticole.
The extreme variety of the Domaine's wine-growing sites (around 220 plots) has led to seeking, for each place, the exact balance between the affirmation of the Terroir, the expression of the Vintage… and the setting of the Grape variety.
Terroir of hard limestone from the Jurassic and marl from Lias
The ALTENBERG DE BERGHEIM is located in the heart of the field of geological faults of RIBEAUVILLE which puts in contact hard limestones of the Jurassic and marls of Lias. These formations rich in fossils formed a poor clay-limestone soil, red (ferruginous), rich in limestone rocks, where the vines must dive deeply to find their energy.
The micro-climate of ALTENBERG, the result of its southern exposure, its distance from the Vosges front and its isolation from the Rhine plain, is terribly hot, dry and almost overexposed. The maturities of the grapes, frequently amplified by Noble Rot, are out of the ordinary and impose the domination of the Terroir over the planted grape varieties.
The return to the ancestral practice of the vineyard planted with all the traditional grape varieties and the single unsorted harvest opens the Pandora's box of the “Grand Vin” for ALTENBERG: the Terroir then becomes the conductor who masters and inspires in all the ranges all the performers (rootstocks and grape varieties, all the conditions of the vintage and even the winegrower!) at the service of a unique score: the pure expression of the Terroir, the balanced symphony of Grand Vin. This synthetic wine then revives the old Alsatian tradition of wines for aging and for travel which, throughout the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and until the end of the 13th century, made possible the gigantic Rhine cultural effort including modern Alsace. is the result.
"The development of this wine marks a stage in my life as a winegrower and a break with the primacy of the grape variety dominating the Terroir from which Alsace has suffered so much over the past hundred years.
Jean-Michel DEISS "
