Everyone Wins With a Roll of This Deiss
Elyas Beria

	The wines of Domaine Marcel Deiss are terroir driven.

I have a friend who has acquired the curious nickname “Johnny Tastebuds.” Undoubtedly it’s due to his supernatural ability to sniff out and unearth great wine, like finding a truffle in a patch of common dirt. This uncanny wine sense has led him to some of the most legendary wine on the planet and in his pantheon of wine gods Jean-Michel Deiss of Domaine Marcel Deiss holds a special place of honor. When he speaks of Deiss, his eyes light up and words seem to fail him. All he can manage at times is to spout out things like, “I mean. I mean. You know.” Followed by delirious mutterings in a giggle-like language punctuated every so often with real words like, “terroir.” It’s clear from his doting expression and from the way that little hearts mysteriously appear over his head when he talks about Jean-Michel Deiss that Johnny Tastebuds is in love with him. And so he should be. Not only are his wines exceptional but Deiss himself is also a compelling character, full of passion and a gentle, fatherly sort of love for the swath of earth where his grapes happen to live.

I tagged along with Johnny Tastebuds to a tasting where I met up with Deiss and it is this love of the land that struck me most as I spoke with him. Ask him about his wine and he invariably starts talking about the land. Indeed terroir, or the combination of soil, climate, and sun in the environment of the vine, is perhaps the single most important driving factor behind his winemaking. The process of making the wine from the grapes seems secondary in importance to the process of actually growing the grapes. Deiss doesn’t view his wines so much as the product of some grapes but rather as the physical manifestation of terroir via the grapes. I probed a little deeper into his philosophy behind terroir and he got downright mystical. With a gleam in his eyes he smiled and leaned into me, softly violating any personal space I thought I had, and talked about the “energy” of the grapes. “Energy?” I asked. When I hear someone speak about the energy of any living thing, I assume they mean its life force, its aura, its qi. But could this self-proclaimed ultra-traditionalist winemaker from the Old World be talking about qi? “Yes, energy,” he assured me, “the essence, the vibration inside the grape.” “My job,” said Deiss, “is to simply allow the true nature of the grape to be expressed, to preserve its energy.”

The winemaking techniques he employs indeed suggest that he goes to great lengths to treat the grapes as gently as possible. During harvesting, rather than trying to get as many pressings per day as possible Deiss fills his presses and then slowly extracts the juice by applying gentle pressure over 24 to 48 hours so as not to crush the skins, seeds, or stems too much. Deiss comments that he respects the grapes as if they were people. “If you are violent towards someone, they become defensive and closed up. But if you respect them then their true nature comes out.” Perhaps attributing the exquisite character of his wines to his mystical approach is a little hard to swallow; it’s easier to credit his deft hands with the achievement. Whatever the reason, I realized as soon as I tasted even his lowly Pinot Blanc or Riesling that Deiss had succeeded in imbuing his white wines with a depth and complexity one usually only encounters in superb red wines. Although I’m still not sure exactly what it means to capture the “true nature” of a grape, it was clear to me that whatever it may be it was sitting there in my glass.

Deiss is also a master of the field blend. He grows different varieties of grapes all together, believing that they cross-pollinate and reach maturity at the same time, though other winemakers ridicule the notion of this technique actually working. He then crushes all of the grapes together, commingling their juices, and from this unscientific and improvised blending of grapes he produces white wines of rare complexity, sophistication, and grace.

The crowning glories of his portfolio are wines that Deiss calls “Grands Crus Vins d'Alsace.” It’s here that I feel I have to mention what the most controversial aspect of his winemaking is: the terroir-driven naming of his wines. Alsace is the only region of France that uses grape varieties to name wines rather than place names. Deiss, however, is bucking this convention and giving his top-end wines names based on their specific wine-growing area rather than on the types of grapes that are in the bottle. Winemakers and wine drinkers alike are up in arms over this seemingly insignificant issue. After all, isn’t what’s in the bottle more important than what’s on the bottle? If you believe so, then you’ll find what’s in the bottles of Deiss’s Grand Crus wines nothing short of extraordinary. Elegant, stately wines with rich, pure, vivid, and mouth-filling expressions of fruit that linger on and on. And running through it all is a vein of minerality reminding you, like a mantra, of the all-important terroir.

When I asked Deiss if there are any New World wines that he feels successfully captures terroir, he smiled and said, “perhaps one or two,” but it was clear that he was being polite. He went on to explain to me that terroir in wine is much more than just a taste of limestone or clay; more than just geography or geology. It’s also history and culture: the spirit of the land, the “vibration” of the grapes, and the souls of generations of farmers that haunt the same rows of vines that Deiss knows like the back of his hand. These generations tenderly tended to the grapes over hundreds—perhaps thousands—of years and their life force has soaked into the slopes.

By the end of our conversation I was a total believer in his wines and in his alchemistic winemaking methods. I thanked Jean-Michel Deiss for his time and retired to a quite corner with Johnny Tastebuds to savor one last taste and to find out what he thought of Deiss’s theory of terroir. “I don’t know,” Johnny said. “I don’t know how he does it. Maybe he sold his soul to the devil. I don’t really care, as long as he keeps doing what he’s doing.” Of course Johnny Tastebuds is right. All of this talk about terroir, pressing methods, and so on might amuse us people who like to think we know about wine, but in the end what matters most is what’s captured in the bottle, and in the case of Domaine Marcel Deiss, it may just be magic.