Colline des anciens White 2021

Colline des anciens White 2021

Domaine Einhart

The aptly named Colline des Anciens is minerality personified: full of freshness and salinity, it is a dry white from Alsace with an alcohol content of 13.6% and a great aromatic depth. This minerality and aromatic depth reflect the great limestone terroir of the Rosheim hillsides: a clay-rich soil on a substrate of muschelkalk and pink limestone. The plots face south on a 20% slope, and the vines have an average age of thirty years. The blend of three Alsatian grape varieties is carried out as follows: the Riesling (40%) is directly pressed, while the Gewurztraminer (20%) and Pinot Gris (40%) are macerated for forty-eight hours. All the grapes come from the estate and are harvested by hand; both the viticulture and the work in the cellar are 100% free of additives and sulfites, and the wine is not filtered. Colline des Anciens is aged exclusively in Alsatian foudres (wooden vats of around a thousand liters).

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Located in the northern part of the Alsatian vineyard, horizontally above Strasbourg, the Einhart estate is a ten-hectare family estate whose vines are located on the hillsides that rise between the Alsace plain and the Vosges mountains. The soil is clay-limestone and rich in fossils (muschelkalk, i.e. shell limestone and oolite limestone, and lettenkohle or dolomitic limestone). Since 1990, Nicolas Einhart has been at the helm, now assisted by his son Théo. True to his commitments to the TIFLO association, of which he is co-founder, Nicolas devotes his winemaking work to the protection of the land and biodiversity, winemaking without inputs, the refusal of harmful phytosanitary products and the maintenance of ecological refuge zones. His estate has been certified organic since 2011. Like Jean-Marc Dreyer [link], he is resolutely moving towards skin maceration and produces white maceration wines (orange wines) in addition to a red Pinot Noir. Entirely manual harvesting, destemming of the bunches, light punching down and delicate pressing are characteristic of the estate, as well as the separate vinification of each terroir, aging on lees and the absence of filtration before bottling. The wines are pure grape, lively, powerful, invigorating, and transcribe the minerality of the very beautiful terroirs of the Vosges foothills.