Catherine Riss "Libre Comme l'Air" Pinot Noir
Regular price $55.00
Unit price per
Grapes: Pinot Noir
Region: Alsace, France
Vintage: 2021 + 2022
Viticulture: Organic
Soils: Limestone Gravel
Vinification: Whole cluster
Aging: Neutral Oak
Fining or Filtering: None
Sulfur: None added
Notes from the Importer: Catherine Riss is running a start-up, that’s clear. And this is one of the few start-ups in Alsace, a region where it is more common for winemaking families to go back several generations. Her background is in the restaurant business and her family’s restaurant is in Gerstheim, a village that sits on the French bank of the River Rhine some 35 km to the east of Catherine’s vineyards. The restaurant is aptly named, Au Bord Du Rhin.
The formal part of her wine education kicked off with a BTS in viticulture in Beaune, then a Diploma in Oenology in Dijon. She got “stuck” a bit longer in Burgundy with an internship at Jean-Louis Trapet on the Cote de Nuits. Not a bad place to develop a taste for Pinot Noir. Trapet also has the Alsace connection through his spouse Andrée, with her 14 hectares of top-notch vineyards around Riquewihr in the Haut Rhin. With that setup, we are sure Catherine got to taste the occasional Alsace cuveé when she was working away in downtown Gevrey-Chambertin.
Further internships followed in the south of France and then the road led back to Alsace, with an assignment for la maison Chapoutier, who were establishing their Alsace operation in Reichsfeld. This gave Catherine some great experience managing the vineyards in the immediate area and getting used to the responsibility around the particular cellar conditions and activities. Enthusiastic to get started with her own domaine, she took over 1.3 hectares of vineyards in 2012 and she has built this up to 3.5 hectares in 2018. Encouragement and some assistance came from Antoine Kreydenweiss and also from Lucas Rieffel where she made her first vintages in the Rieffel cellars in Mittelbergheim. The big jump forward happened in 2015, when she set up her own winemaking and storage space in Bernardvillé. - Camille Rivière