Alsace has, in the past, been characterised by its sweeter wines—polarising Gewürztraminers and Rieslings that can lead towards being heady and cloying. These days, however, it is one of the beating hearts of the French natural wine movement, and my drive through the lush landscapes studded with Germanic castles and storks is leading me to one of its true champions.

Jean Baltenweck owns and runs vineyard and winery Domaine Clé de Sol with his son Simon, but it is Jean alone who welcomes me into his cellar when I arrive. Here, he produces the instantly recognisable bottles—their label often depicting one of the butterflies that frequents their vines—so beloved in natural wine circles both in Paris, where I live, and beyond.

Speaking with the casual air of a farmer who (for reasons unbeknown to myself) can hardly believe I'm interested in his thoughts, Jean is constantly apologising for talking at such length about his passion. He guides me through the decades of experience that have led him towards a subversive approach, producing drier but no less aromatic iterations of the varietals so suited to the terroir of his vineyard, often standing in opposition to many of his peers.

On a guided tour, not only through his wines and artisan juices but also through the biodiverse garden sprawling behind the cellar, I begin to grasp part of what makes Jean's approach so singular—and so successful.

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Emily Monaco: Your vineyard looks pretty different from a lot of the agricultural land we see around here. Why is that?

Jean Baltenweck: When I was growing up, corn monocultures seemed really ugly to me. Walking on the plains, it was just corn, corn, corn. All of these rows lined up because of mechanisation. It bothered me. I thought it was more beautiful to see trees, things like that. And so here, we’ve planted fruit trees in the vines.

We have 120 varieties of local apples, about 30 varieties of pears, plus cherries, Mirabelle plums, damsons, medlars, walnuts, hazelnuts, and almonds. We’ve got an almond tree that was apparently planted during the French Revolution! As far as we’re concerned, vines and orchards are not incompatible. On the contrary. We need a certain harmony.

EM: You used to have 22 hectares of grapevines. You’ve chosen to reduce that to just three and a half. Why is that?

JB: I planned on 20-22 hectares because to make money, it was better to do more. But it didn’t suit me at all. I was really interested in ecology, and there was a latent incompatibility there. So we progressively cut back: in 1997, we halved it, keeping eight and a half hectares, and to get to the structure we have now, we halved it again, so we’ve got three and a half hectares.

But I’ve got a conservationist spirit in me—it’s in my genes, practically—so we worked on the fruit tree side of things, which I do both with an association and on my own so that there’s more than one way for these older varieties that we don’t really see much anymore on market stalls.

EM: Is that common among associations looking to preserve old varieties?

JB: There are a lot of associations doing similar things, like Kokopelli. But we’re unique in that we’re focused on fruit trees. I started my association 23 years ago, or thereabouts. On the one hand, we’re targeting people’s emotional side, with the conservation association, and then on the other, the taste of the fruit and these ingredients that are produced in a natural way, for the commercial side of things.

EM: Why was this so important to you?

JB: Because at the beginning, people didn’t really care! No one buys fancy juice like this. It doesn’t interest them. When you put old varieties of fruit on a market stall, people don’t want them, even though they’re delicious! People say, “Oh, those are weird!” Or there are people who, a bit like for tomatoes, when they see it’s not round, they kind of shy away, until you tell them, “Oh, no, it’s a beefsteak,” and then they’re drawn to it. But for apples and pears… we’re just not there yet.

EM: How do you organise all of this diversity in such a small area?

JB: We have vines in the orchards, fruit trees in the vines. We have orchards on their own and vines on their own. We’ve got everything. There aren’t a lot of wild areas left, so we like to preserve that, especially in our orchards. A tree falls, and mushrooms grow over it; rodents come and eat. It’s life, and it’s indispensable to renewal.

EM: What do your winemaker colleagues think about that?

JB: Vines are really the star product in Alsace, but I personally don’t place them higher than cherry trees or apple trees or pear trees. For me, it’s all the same. And everything that goes with them: from the ladybird to the butterfly to the spider to the ant to the lizard. It all goes together. Instead of trying to keep them from coming onto the vines and causing problems, it’s better to welcome them and see how we can work together. And it’s a completely different way of working.

Twenty years ago, people told me it was stupid. Now, my neighbours are starting to do the same thing! When it’s hot outside, everyone wants to park their car under my tree. Some even come ask me to move my car over so they can park there. “Plant a tree!” I say. Of course… it’ll take some time to grow.

““That’s the living, random side of things. Some things work and other things don’t.””

— Jean Baltenweck

EM: This philosophy of letting nature take its course can be seen in the way you work your vines as well, right? Specifically at harvest time?

JB: We harvest when the vine decides it’s time: when the seed is ripe. So we look at the pips inside the grapes, and when they’re entirely brown, and there’s no green, either visually or in the flavour, then it’s time to harvest.

We want the grape, the land, and the year to be what makes the wine. If the year is hot, we’ll have a hot wine. If the year is cold, we’ll have a colder wine. But we’re never going to harvest earlier because the year is hot, just to retain tension. We don’t do that. We only harvest when the pip is ripe.

EM: Why is that so important?

JB: We want the seed to be viable. It’s not that we’re going to use it, but we want it to be viable. The plant doesn’t care what we do with the juice. What matters is its progeniture—its baby. And if the plant has finished its cycle, it’s done the work it needed to do.

EM: Are there any benefits to doing this from a winemaking perspective?

JB: At the end of the life cycle, the plant produces components that are similar to polyphenols, antioxidants, things like that. They can protect the grape from oxidation, which actually means that fermentation is more difficult. That’s why most people don’t harvest when the pip is ripe. What we found as a solution was maceration. We end up with more nutritional elements from the skin, which protect the wine and lets us do away with sulfites. There are a few elements that could seem incompatible, but that actually come together. From multiple negative elements, we make a positive.

EM: This philosophy of letting nature takes its course seems to touch everything you do, from farming to vinifying. Can you tell me about that?

JB: We want the wine to tell the story of the plot of land and that’s it. We bring in the grapes, we choose how we’re going to vinify them—maceration or not. We press them gently, and we funnel them directly into the barrel. And until bottling, they stay in the same barrel. We don’t do anything.

EM: Do you barrel-age all of your wines?

JB: Only the Pinots—Pinot Blanc, Pinot Gris, Pinot Noir—and the Sylvaner, a bit, depending on the year. They’re sensitive to reduction [sulfidic off-flavours produced due to a lack of oxygen in the winemaking process which can range from struck match, cabbage, or rotten egg], and the barrel gives them a micro-oxygenation. I have friends in Burgundy, and after seven or eight wines, they don’t want the barrel anymore. So I buy it from them, because I—on the contrary—don’t want the barrel to give any flavour to the wine.

Riesling and Gewürztraminer, on the other hand, are sensitive to oxidation, so we vinify those in stainless steel. We like simple vessels. Stainless steel is quite modern, but it’s neutral. So it’s a compromise with technology, as it’s really very stable.

EM: That’s a rare desire among natural winemakers like yourself!

JB: Yes, my colleagues often sell their wines to be drunk young. When they have a wine that’s two, three years old, they don’t know what to do with it. Here, we’ve prioritised the length of the wine before the pleasure of drinking it immediately. Having wines that are 30, 40, 50 years old and that are still good to drink… I like that a lot. It means that they were made by the generation before us.

““The first wines were macerated. They had to have been. You couldn’t have invented a press before knowing that wine was good.””

— Jean Baltenweck

In the beginning, people would say it’s not compatible, to not want to use sulfites but also to make wines you could cellar. They’re two things you can’t combine. But you can! We just do everything kind of backwards. Since we harvest when the pip is ripe, we always have a bit of glycerol in the fermentation, so that gives us silky wines with a bit of fat, but no sugar. So people who don’t like sweet wines still like them, and people who do like sweet wines often like them as well, because they’re not green.

Often, people who like sweet wines don’t actually like the sugar; they just don’t like the taste of unripe grapes with lots of malic acid. We have very little malic acid in our wines. We do a malolactic fermentation on all of our wines, which is pretty rare in Alsace. And it protects the wine.

EM: Alsace has a pretty strong wine identity. How do more traditional winemakers react to your wines?

JB: Sometimes people say to me: “that’s not a Riesling.” And—depending on what kind of mood I’m in—I’d reply: “It’s a Riesling, and it might be more of a Riesling than the others!”

We’re only using grapes; no sulfites, no cheating. And if you think about the first winemakers when people didn’t know about wine, they would find a grape they liked, and think, “Oh, I like this!” and pick a lot of it. And if they couldn’t eat all of it, they’d say, “Oh, I can’t eat it all, I’ll put it in here.” And they’d store it in an animal hide or a terracotta pot. And it would ferment, and that’s the first wines. Which were macerated—they had to have been. You couldn’t have invented a press before knowing that wine was good.

EM: You took your 2013 Riesling off the market. How come?

JB: That wine still had a lot of fruit notes, citrus notes, and since it’s a Vin de Garde [a wine destined for ageing], I think it’s something we’ll be able to keep for 40, 50 years. Its style was changing so much that we didn’t know from one week to the next what it was going to be like.

So we decided to stop selling it. Because otherwise, if we tell people to expect citrus notes, and then people instead get a mineral note, they’ll come back and tell us that it’s not at all how we described. And then also, it was selling out too fast. So we stopped it, we’re not selling anymore. We’ll hold onto it, and we’ll drink it when it’s settled into its style.

EM: It feels like your wine tells you how it wants to be made!

JB: Everything I learned about oenology, we pretty much do the opposite. For instance, we leave the must when we press the grapes and let it all oxidise. The juice goes all brown, and I have oenologist colleagues who tell me: “You’re crazy! You have these beautiful grapes and you’ve destroyed half of them. Look at how ugly they are! It looks like mud!”

But it’s all a process. The fermentation starts, and then the juice becomes clear, and everything that was supposed to oxidise does. Every year, we have at least one cuvée that’s completely ruined—undrinkable— destined for the distillery. But that’s the living, random side of things. Some things work and other things don’t.

I still have a 1988 wine in a barrel. Natural! It’s a late-harvest gewürztraminer, so it’s 18% alcohol, 15 degrees of residual sugar. It’s not protected at all! People at the time told me that it was stupid. I thought, OK, so maybe it won’t work… but I want to try it. So I tried and tried, and I had a lot of failures, but this one has stuck around. It’s had every illness you can imagine. It had three grams of volatile acidity. Then it had a voile [also know as flor, or a pellicle] on top, like Jura wines. And the voile ate the volatile acidity! It got all fatty, so it looked like you had oil in the glass. It’s alive!

Oenology, as we learn it, is a set of rules, and there’s a list of what you’re supposed to do and what you’re not supposed to do. People who make natural wine toss that all out and go on a discovery, with trials and the knowledge that it could be great or it could be catastrophic. But I’d rather have a great wine and a catastrophic wine than make two wines that aren’t interesting at all.