2004 Alsace Wines

In recent years, the wines of Alsace have struggled in the U.S. market. Some low-end, inexpensive wines continue to sell briskly in the mass market, but at the level of Alsace's serious producers-those who normally keep their vine yields to reasonable levels-today's more price-conscious market has been buying sparingly. One problem is that there is currently no effective Alsace trade organization to present the region's wines to export markets, and to educate new wine drinkers who may not even know that Alsace is part of France. And for wine drinkers with histories of enjoying these wines, the difficulty of finding truly dry wine in an Alsace bottle has been a problem for a while now, as has the vast number of labels offered each year by the typical domaine. But the best Alsace wines are utterly delicious and remarkably food-friendly. For those readers who are not familiar with these wines, I predict that 90% of the wines rated 88 points or higher in this issue will offer fresher and more interesting drinking four or five years years down the road than the overwhelming majority of, say, California chardonnays from the same vintages, and they will also be far more useful at the dinner table. And this year, happily, I got the distinct impression that many estates are finally attempting to make wines with less residual sugar.

It's hard to avoid the feeling that, even though excellent and even outstanding wines were made in both 2004 and 2005, Alsace did not get the best of the weather in either year. Regions like Burgundy benefitted in 2004 from a clement September and a dry start to October following a difficult summer, and were thus able to bring in much of their fruit in good conditions. Most of Alsace's wine-farmers, on the other hand, harvested their most important vineyards in and around substantial rainfall that began on October 8. According to Marc Hugel, the village of Riquewihr received just 9 millimeters of rain during the first week of October, but 72 during the second week, 36 during the third week and 81 more during the last 10 days of the month. This was quite unusual for Alsace, which normally enjoys dry weather in October. Not since 1993 has total October precipitation been even half as high as the roughly eight inches of rain that fell over much of the region in 2004.