99pts Wine AdvocateThe 2022 Grand Cru Mambourg displays an intense, dark yellow color and opens with a super intense and concentrated yet elegant and mineral bouquet of ripe yellow fruits and dark citrus fruits, crushed salts, limestone rocks and a hint of
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99pts Wine Advocate
The 2022 Grand Cru Mambourg displays an intense, dark yellow color and opens with a super intense and concentrated yet elegant and mineral bouquet of ripe yellow fruits and dark citrus fruits, crushed salts, limestone rocks and a hint of mocha beans and iodine notes. Full-bodied, round and very rich yet also very elegant and refined on the palate, this is a very generous, powerful and concentrated yet also stimulating saline and finely tannic Mambourg with a long, warm and super intense, saline and crunchy finish. In this warm vintage, the Mambourg comes across like a Hermitage and should be exciting to follow through the vintage river for several years. 14% stated alcohol. Natural cork. Tasted at the domaine in November 2024.
It always takes a few hours to get through the profound wines of this domaine in Bergheim, each of which has its own personality. The fact that you can easily spend a whole day here is not because of senior Jean-Michel Deiss, with whom you can have passionate discussions, even beyond all the wines. Jean-Michel only shows up briefly nowadays, usually in overalls, because he is as active in the vineyard as he always wanted to be but never could because he was also the spokesperson for the domaine and the wine world explainer. He has long since handed over this job to Mathieu, his son, who has been directing the estate for many years and has perhaps even further refined the taste of the individual terroirs in recent years. He is also willing to experiment and takes different approaches than his father, but they are also contemporary. Outstanding white or orange wines can also be fermented on the skins. But Mathieu does not do this for the sake of the zeitgeist. He is open to new and traditional methods in order to capture and express the character of a location. He explains this at length and sometimes poetically, making it clear that he is not only a winemaker but also a reflective and creative artist. He always gives his highly complex grands crus more time than the premiers crus so that they are not too abstract when they are served. I therefore tasted them a good six months after the other single-vineyard wines, as well as the wines from his own Domaine Le Vignoble du Rveur (The Dreamer’s Vineyard) from his maternal grandfather’s vineyards.
As is well known, the wines of the 38-hectare Marcel Deiss domaine are not varietal wines like modern Alsace wines but field blends. Deiss does not produce Riesling, Gewrztraminer or Pinot Noir, but rather terroir wines. The respective terroir is far more complex and characterizes the wine more than any grape variety ever could. For this reason, terroir is communicated (and “the art of co-plantation”) but not the grape variety. The respective terroir is even provided in two languages, because the official German designations still offend the people of Alsace and are more difficult to market in France. And, of course, because terroir is a profoundly French concept, as the two men say on their website’s homepage: It is as subtle as our philosophy and our language are… It is by essence an object in movement, a work in progress never finished, always reinvented but yet totally functional.
Located on the various slopes of the communes of Rorschwihr, Bergheim, Ribeauvill, Zellenberg, Riquewihr and Sigolsheim, it is the largest and most diversified vineyard of the domaine. It is “a vineyard, fascinating by its complexity and therefore its wine-making possibilities, which cannot be reduced to a single type of wine.” It is this “network of differences, even contradictions” that magnificently illustrates the uniqueness of Alsace: “Our region is rich above all in its differences.”
Even more than Jean-Michel, Mathieu explores the resulting possibilities in the vineyard itself, as well as during the harvest and the processing of the grapes and the maturation of the musts and wines. It is a wide range of personalities that we try to understand or at least to appreciate. Yes, the Deiss men are proud and self-confident men, and they have every reason to be with the current collection of 2022 white and red wines and of the vintages 2023, 2022 and 2020. Like 2015 and 2018, these were very warm and sunny vintages, and in addition to perfect physiological ripeness, the grapes also gave the wines tremendous depth and, thanks to the mineral, salty substance, also tension, vitality and energy. Here and there, we tasted some other previous vintages, as these were missing in our database.
Grand crus such as the 2022 Mambourg and the 2022 Altenberg are among the greatest white wines in France. They may not be immediately recognized as Alsatian wines in blind tastings, but that is only because they are the result of densely planted, biodynamically farmed vineyards with cordon pruning and absurdly low yields. The wines from Mathieu Deiss, which are as rich as they are firm and complex, are provided with dry extracts that are so high that they might, or should, age for decades. Grands crus such as Altenberg or Schoenenbourg rarely ferment to dry here and will need at least a decade to be emancipated from their higher doses of unfermented sugar. The 2020 Burlenberg, the finest I have tasted here in 10 years, shows that Deiss is today also one of the outstanding producers of Pinot Noir-based red wines in Alsace. Published:Feb 06, 2025
96pts Vinous
The 2022 Mambourg Grand Cru is a field blend of Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Pinot Noir and Auxerrois planted on this warm site. A touch of smoked hay sets the tone on the nose. The palate is far more fluid and slender than the nose would suggest. It is smooth, with a waxy, smoky, pleasant bitterness, always wrapped in lovely smokiness but with so much cool direction. (Bone-dry) Drinking Window: 2028-2055
– ByAnne Krebiehl, MWonJanuary 2025
Mathieu Deiss showed a wonderful collection of wines that are luminous, elegant, structured and so poised. Every year, he seems to hone his sites a little more, playing with skin maceration and sheer mastery of his soil-and-vine combinations. This seemed to allow Deiss and his vines to magically withstand the extremes of heat and drought in 2022 and 2023 and emerge with elegance. Deiss, together with Chteau Ollwiller and Domaine Trapet, is now also one of the lucky new owners of Grand Cru Rangen de Thann. But this is not the only news; Deiss now also has a designated site where he propagates rootstocks only so as to be able to graft his own massal selections. He hopes to achieve more resilience in the vines by allowing these rootstocks to develop and establish for a longer period before being grafted. This is a perfect example of the kind of visionary viticultural effort Deiss undertakes. Bravo.
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