Les Forêts Oubliées VdF 2024

An Auxerrois built on clarity: crystalline fruit, palate-cleansing freshness and a pronounced spiciness. At 11.5% ABV it stays light without losing tension.

The roughly 30-year-old vines stand in the Harth lieu-dit near Zellenberg, at 290 metres altitude and facing east-southeast, a cool site with late ripening. Beneath the vines lies a shallow layer of glacial moraine made of gravel over limestone marl from the early Jurassic, the Lias. The vineyard is farmed by hand, with 14,000 vines per hectare. The name recalls the forests that once covered these hills and now live on only in the local place names.

100 percent Auxerrois. Picking is timed by pH 3.2, not by potential alcohol. The grapes are pressed gently for eight hours in a hydraulic wooden press, a technique borrowed from Champagne; the must ferments spontaneously in old Burgundy barrels, with no added sulphur and no oenological aids. Paul McKirdy ran the cellar at Zind-Humbrecht for fourteen years, while Jolene Hunter handled export there, before the two began making their own wines in Zellenberg in 2023.

Fine spice, gentle carbonation and a pleasant tannic grip. The fruit stays in the background, showing as green apple and lemon; on the nose beforehand, pale apple, white peach, a touch of verbena and lemongrass.

3.5 hectares between Riquewihr and Ribeauvillé, taken over from Marc Tempé, yield at most 25,000 bottles a year. The label reads Vin de France rather than AOC, and the wine is bottled in a Burgundy bottle rather than the Alsace flute.