Vins Mader - Alsace, France
Jerome Mader.
VINS MADER, TIME TO FALL IN LOVE WITH ALSACE
Team E&R has always loved the cool, crisp wines of Alsace and on many visits spent time with our favorite winemakers there tasting and learning. Between our inaugural year in 1999 until around 2008, we have watched the prices of these wines increase from anywhere between 15 and 60%. Yes, the quality was there, but our support was not. Our passion for the wines remained as intense as ever, which is why we went there again and again to find great quality at better pricing. After visiting several strong new candidates for our "almost direct imports" program, we visited Jérôme and loved his wines.
If you are unfamiliar with “Vins Mader” don’t worry or be suspicious, they are well known in France and are considered as making among the finest value wines in Alsace. Their property is small - only about 14 acres - they do not try to make a wine that appeals to the most common taste denominator. Winemaker Jérôme Mader has fully converted fully to organic winemaking and the results are now beginning to be tasted, the wines are the best they have ever produced. The farming and vineyard work is managed bio-dynamically, and along with the cellar management is geared toward making high quality, dry, mineral-rich wines. The Mader style is for true “classic” Alsatian wine. Each varietal is produced to highlight the essence of the grape and its communion with the soil. For their quality, the Mader wines - highly affordable - allow you to feel free to fall in love with Alsace and not sacrifice a few mortgage payments.
The young and energetic Jérôme Mader took over the family Domaine several years ago helping Vins Mader gain recognition by one of the region's foremost critical authorities as one of the Top Ten wineries for VALUE in all of Alsace.
Old black and white…
A CERTAINTY OF PLACE
Central to the best wines - the most expressive, not the most expensive - "place" plays a vital role. Authentic, well made wine communicates uniqueness of place through flavor, complexity and singular finish. These wines reward with pleasure.
Perhaps our favorite aspect of Alsatian Jerome Mader's wines is their clear delineation of his grapes and his terroir.
Making wine echoing its place isn't easy. Most wines don't. First off, it sounds corny; eh- a wine that echoes its place? That tells you by taste where it is from. But it's like riding a bike, you just try explaining it to someone who doesn't know how. In the case of wine, you TASTE it- the varietal, the grape. What is the grape? Can you tell by tasting? This isn't so simple a mission... Then, there is the place, an even harder to achieve goal. You can't allow things to get in the way, such as wood, additives, poor farming... the list goes on.
Take Pinot Gris for example - choose five well made versions from around the world - you can pick them out, or at least know they are made from Pinot Gris by tatse. You can't make a well made Gris like Mader's from Oregon or from Alto-Adige or Friuli and not vice-versa either; the voice of the place comes through when unencumbered.
The point it not to say one is better, but that the distinction of the grape and the place are allowed to show through. That makes most wines like those worth seeking out and worth experiencing.
Is place important?
Well, to us the Mader wines taste true to the grape and the ground, they pair more successfully with food and they are less expensive than most other in our market for the price.
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"OUR WINES ARE DRY"
-translation of sign out front at Vins Mader
Once tasters try the wines, they love them. They quickly find they are NOT sweet, they have great acidity and character and they have enduring complexity and flavor. Here is a revealing snippet from an article from Food and Wine magazine:
Trimbach makes a wide range of wines, all very good and all very dry. But the glory of Trimbach is its grand cru wine, Clos Ste. Hune. It is not only one of the greatest Rieslings in Alsace but also one of its longest-lived; coincidentally, I'd had a 1973 Clos Ste. Hune only a few weeks earlier that was remarkably vibrant and fresh. When Trimbach opened the most recent release, the 1999 Clos Ste. Hune, it had the same extraordinary persistence and finesse, even though it was still extremely young.
Clos Ste. Hune is part of the grand cru Rosacker vineyard; and while it's the most famous, it's not the only wine that's made there. Were there other wines from Rosacker that Trimbach admired? I asked over lunch at the Wistub du Sommelier in Bergheim, which serves perfectly prepared Alsace dishes like onion tart and choucroute. There were quite a few winemakers having lunch there that day, and all of them seemed to be friends with Jean Trimbach.
Trimbach named the Rosacker of Mader as a wine he admired. I had never heard of the Mader winery. Where was it? "Go to Hunawihr and take a left at the fork in the road," Trimbach answered—a typically Alsace-style direction.
The tasting room was closed when I arrived. But when I knocked at the door, a woman opened a window and asked, in French, what I wanted. To buy of bottle of your Rosacker, I replied. A few minutes later, her 24-year-old son appeared. Jerome Mader was surprised to see an American in his town. "We have almost no American tourists here," he told me. His wines aren't sold in the United States "except in Virginia." Why not? Mader shrugged his shoulders: "We do nothing to sell our wines; we just answer the phone and the doorbell."
It was over a decade ago we first visited young Jerome Mader in Hunawhir just as he was taking over the winemaking from his Dad. Since those days Jerome was selected by France's top wine publication Revue du Vin as the top young winemaker in Alsace some four vintages into our work with him. To his credit, he has continued learning and making improvements vintage by vintage - in particular with vineyard management. The wines we loved on our first visit are better than ever, add to that Jerome has kept prices so very fair. We've not tasted better values in the region in the last decade; value accentuated by our almost direct work with the Mader wines coming direct to our state.
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When in stock, wines from this producer appear below. Click on each wine for more detail.