A Vintage to Remember in Alsace, Plus Chardonnay Greats from California: Weekly Tasting Report

Senior Editor Stuart Pigott’s tastings in Alsace have led him to the conclusion that 2023 is the best vintage for the region since 2019. Nowhere was that clearer than at the Domaine Zind Humbrecht winery just outside the historic town of Colmar. Some older consumers still associate the name of Zind Humbrecht with rich and extravagant, off-dry wines, but the truth is that today, under co-owners Oliver and Margaret Hubrecht, nobody in the region is more committed to dry purity and forthright minerality than this winery.

In every sense of the word, the Domaine Zind Humbrecht Pinot Gris Alsace Grand Cru Rangen de Thann Clos Saint Urbain 2023 is a perfect expression of this. It has a brain-rattling intensity of the smoky and flinty character that makes this site with volcanic soil a unique French terroir. Nothing could be further removed from the standard wines of this grape – known as pinot grigio in Italy and grauburgunder in Germany – than this powerful and precise wonder.

And winemaker Pierre-Emile Humbrecht – the son of Oliver and Margaret – didn’t make only one amazing wine from the Grand Cru Rangen in 2023, he made three of them. The Domaine Zind Humbrecht Riesling Alsace Grand Cru Rangen de Thann Clos Saint Urbain 2023 is a masterpiece with as much elegance and finesse as power. And the Domaine Zind Humbrecht Gewürztraminer Alsace Grand Cru Rangen de Thann Clos Saint Urbain 2023 has unbelievable spice and smokiness, yet no hint of the opulence that this grape is famed for.

The wideness of this producer’s vineyard holdings means that these great wines are only one side of its production. The Zind Humbrecht wines from the Clos Windsbuhl site are extreme expressions of limestone terroir, and those from the Grand Crus Brand, Sommerberg and Wineck-Schlossberg, do the same for granite. Scroll down through the notes below to find out more about this extraordinary diversity of greatness.

The commitment to terroir is every bit as extreme at Domaine Marcel Deiss in Bergheim, to the north of Colmar. However, here it is married to a commitment to nonvarietal wines. You couldn’t find a better expression of this than the Domaine Marcel Deiss Grand Cru Schoenenbourg 2020. It stubbornly refuses to fit into conventional categories like dry and off-dry. Here, richness and saline minerality collide like two planets in the early history of the solar system.

Just as this wine is a cuvee based on riesling, the Domaine Marcel Deiss Burlenberg La Colline Brûlée 2020 is one based on pinot noir, but not entirely defined by this grape. It is winemaker Mathieu Deiss’s best red wine so far. Although many wine lovers consider pinot noir to be the ultimate terroir wine, our experience is that the wines of this grape rarely have the kind of full-throttle minerality that this one does, plus incredibly deep wet earth, savory and wild berry aromas.

Deiss recently took over the vineyards of his mother’s family and the wines from them are now marketed under the Le Vignoble du Rêveur label. They are impressive natural wines made with a great feeling for balance and clarity.

Stuart also visited the Albert Boxler winery in the historic village of Niedermorschwihr for the first time in many years and was stunned by the 2023 vintage wines that the father and son team of Jean and Louis Boxler made. None of them was more extraordinary than the Albert Boxler Riesling Alsace Grand Cru Sommerberg Dudenstein 2023, which comes from vines planted in 1946. The intensely stony character of this wine is wrapped in a very deep blanket of stone fruit and wildflower aromas that you feel like you are rolling in.

Albert Boxler is an unusual Alsace winery, because almost all the wines grow on granitic soil, giving them a sleek and pristine personality, even when they have considerable power like this one does. No wonder they have a cult following!

California's Chardonnay Greats

Any roster of California’s greatest chardonnay vineyards  has to include such names as Bacigalupi, Van der Kamp, Ritchie, Hanzell and Hyde. And guess what? All of those names and more are included in this weekly report.

Our Napa-based team of Executive Editor Jim Gordon and Associate Editor Ryan Montgomery tasted great examples from the creme de la creme of mostly Northern California chardonnays from 2023 and 2022. These limited notes and scores from our most recent tastings don’t prove per se that either vintage is better than the other for chardonnay, but it’s 2023 that many winemakers are the most enthusiastic about.

And why not? It was a virtually perfect growing season, long and unusually cool, giving every grape variety plenty of time to gain flavor and structure without cooking off the desired acidity needed for freshness and balance.

Feast your eyes on 77 California chardonnay tasting notes below. Eight of them scored 97 points and higher.

The highest mark went to the Nid Tissé Chardonnay Napa Valley Carneros Hyde Vineyard 2023. Jim said it’s difficult to imagine a better California chardonnay than this one, made by Marie-Laure Ammons, as it combines great balance and freshness with creaminess, breadth and length.

Ryan was especially psyched about another wine from the southern part of Napa Valley. He called the Haynes Vineyard Chardonnay Coombsville Corazon 2022 mineral driven with a lovely phenolic grip and striking acidity.

Stephane Vivier earned similarly great scores for his Chardonnay Napa Valley Carneros Hyde Vineyard 2023 and on the Sonoma side of the Mayacamas Mountains for two more chards: the Sonoma Mountain Van der Kamp Vineyard 2023 and Petaluma Gap Gap’s Crown Vineyard 2023.

Look below for more outstanding Sonoma-grown examples from vineyards like Bacigalupi, Zio Tony, Ritchie and Rued. Three chardonnays from Sonoma-centered Donum Estate also rated among our top wines this week.

Whispers of Promise from Virginia

Virginia’s wine industry is in a remarkable place right now, as Staff Writer and Taster Brian Freedman discovered last week during his first comprehensive visit to the commonwealth. Over the course of four days, he visited a dozen wineries and met with another seven or eight producers, and he has also been rounding out his coverage with an extensive look at additional reds, whites, rosés and sparklers at his office outside of Philadelphia. So far, he has tasted nearly 150 wines, with many more to go. The quality, expressiveness and detail have been impressive.

It makes sense. Virginia has held serious promise for years now, and it seems as if it’s finally living up to its potential across the expanse of the state – from Loudon County, which is just 25 miles from Washington DC, to the Blue Mountains, Southern Virginia, the Eastern Shore and beyond.

Less than an hour and a half drive west of Washington is Linden Vineyards, where the owner, Jim Law, has seen the improvement firsthand. “Just in the last five years or so, I’ve seen better and better sites right here in Linden,” he said. “We get together and taste, and I'm like, ‘Wow!’ Whereas 30 years ago, you would've had a bunch of mediocre sites and mediocre wine.”

That’s just not the case anymore. Indeed, over half of the wines that Brian tasted scored 90 or above. Among the most exciting was the RdV Vineyards Middleburg Lost Mountain 2022, a cabernet sauvignon and cabernet franc blend whose tobacco leaf and herbal aromatics follow through to a taut, midweight palate that flashes with crunchy minerality alongside brambly berries, purple plums and a dusting of espresso. It’s terrific already and promises to reward patience over the coming decades.

Tannat-based reds also showed well, including the lilac-, espresso- and fig-scented 2020 Monticello bottling from Michael Shaps. It’s a compact, ageworthy red that embodies the serious potential for this variety in Virginia. And Bordeaux-style blends, long a highlight of the Virginia wine firmament, have improved as well, not just with fruit quality but also with a more judicious use of oak.

Whites impressed across the spectrum, from a number of lively, mineral albariños to classically styled viogniers whose interplay of fruit and aromatic lift was managed with solid attention to detail. And some petit manseng bottlings, from more bracing expressions like the Early Mountain Petit Manseng Virginia 2022 to sweeter ones like the Glen Manor Petit Manseng Virginia Late Harvest Rapheus 2022 proved to be standouts as well.

Virginia has come a long way, and its promise for the future is huge. Site selection and vineyard work are both thoughtful and forward-thinking, from row spacing and canopy management to irrigation practices, sustainability efforts and more.

Matthieu Finot, winemaker for King Family Vineyards, pointed out that, “Nowadays, more and more people are starting to plant in places that are more suitable for grapes.”

Whether that means seeking out sites with greater elevation or increasingly understanding the finer differences from one block to another in existing vineyards, there is a real sense of optimism, thoughtfulness and excitement energizing the Virginia wine industry. The best wines embody that with verve.

– Stuart Pigott, Jim Gordon and Brian Freedman contributed reporting.

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated during the past week by James Suckling and the other tasters at JamesSuckling.com. They include many latest releases not yet available on the market, but which will be available soon. Some will be included in upcoming tasting reports.

Note: You can sort the wines below by country, vintage, score and alphabetically by winery name. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.