Zind-Humbrecht makes its argument on the label, where the vineyard name is printed larger than the grape. The domaine's whole position is that in Alsace the ground decides more than the variety, so it bottles each site on its own instead of blending them into a house style. Olivier Humbrecht, who in 1989 became the first Frenchman to pass the Master of Wine exam, runs the estate on that conviction.
Three grapes do most of the work: Pinot Gris, Gewürztraminer, and Riesling, which between them account for the bulk of the roughly seventy wines listed here. Rather than one Riesling, there is a Riesling from each named plot, and the point is that they do not taste alike. The same variety, farmed the same way, comes out lean and stony from one slope and broad and spiced from the next.
Alsace
The farming is biodynamic, converted at the end of the 1990s, and the wines ferment slowly on wild yeast in large old casks that add age rather than oak flavor. The extreme case is the Rangen de Thann, a steep volcanic grand cru in the far south of Alsace where the Clos Saint Urbain sits. Its Riesling is the estate's most rated wine and tastes of smoke and struck flint in a way no other Alsace site quite repeats.
For a drinker, the lesson carries past this one producer. On a good Alsace label the vineyard name is doing the talking, and learning a few of them tells you more about what is in the glass than the grape printed beside it. Zind-Humbrecht simply makes that harder to ignore than most.
