A New Dawn For France's Historic Wine Valleys: Renaissance In The Making At The Heart Of The Côtes du Rhône And Alsace

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An exploration into why the two-thousand-year-old wine regions of Alsace and Rhône are now among the coolest wines on the block.

What if I told you, you could find the future of wine in two regions that have been making wine since the Roman world? One sits up against the Franco-German border, its villages full of awry half-timbered houses, with storks nesting on the chimneys. The other runs down the spine of a great river towards the Mediterranean, past Roman theatres, medieval villages and sunlit vineyard slopes. Both have been growing grapes for roughly two thousand years. Both also do things more or less the same way they’ve been done for several generations. These two regions are Alsace and the Rhône Valley.

When I sat down in Singapore with the representatives who speak for two of France’s oldest wine regions, almost everything they told me concerned the present and an exciting future. There’s the story of a young red grape forcing its way into an elite club of Grand Crus that had been white-only for its entire history. There’s a generation of young winemakers in their twenties and thirties coming home from harvests in the New World and now meaningfully reshaping how their families work. And there’s another way of drinking; fresher and crisper wines that are often slightly chilled, that fits a hot and hurried city like ours far better than big, heavy wines.

The two people leading the seminar are Thierry Fritsch of Comité Interprofessionnel des Vins d'Alsace (CIVA), the trade body that represents every Alsace grower, and Julie Coutton-Siadou of Inter Rhône, which does the same job for the wider Rhône Valley. The two trade bodies have had a long history of collaboration and have been presenting their wines to Asia together for years.

Two Roman-prized regions drawn by the rivers

We start with the geography. Wine regions tend to spring up wherever it is easy to move barrels, and for most of history that meant water. Both of these regions sit along a working artery the Romans prized.

(Source: InterRhône)

In the Côtes du Rhône, the river did the drawing. Julie put it plainly in our interview: the Greeks and then the Romans sailed into the port of Marseille, pushed up the Rhône Valley, and planted grape vines as they went, which is why the vineyards still trace the water today. The vines at Vienne, just south of Lyon, have been worked for about two thousand years with total continuity.

The river was the first trade route for the region's wine, and Inter Rhône likes to call it a 200-kilometre hyphen joining the cooler northern vineyards to the sun-baked south. It did more than carry boats. Over millions of years the Rhône river kept flooding and retreating, laying down the gravel, sand and famous galets roulés, the smooth heat-storing pebbles, that still shape how the wines taste.

Alsace was drawn by a far more violent geology. The vineyards that trace the Rhine River sit on the western shoulder of the Rhine Rift Valley, a giant trench where the earth's crust pulled apart and dropped, leaving the Vosges mountains on one side and Germany's Black Forest on the other. That violent geology is the reason Alsace can claim one of the most fragmented patchworks of soil anywhere in France: granite, limestone, schist, sandstone, volcanic rock and more, sometimes four or five different formations inside a single village. Thierry traces the region's wine back to the second century, around the time of Roman influence on this much-trafficked frontier.

(Source: CIVA)

There is a neat contrast in how the two regions remember their golden ages. The Côtes du Rhône's came in the fourteenth century, when the popes decamped to Avignon and turned the area into a centre of money, building and taste. That papal chapter helped give the southern vineyards lasting prestige, but the Côtes du Rhône’s story is much broader than Avignon alone: its identity now stretches across villages and crus such as Gigondas, Vacqueyras and Cairanne. Alsace peaked a little earlier and then paid for its location.

Strasbourg Cathedral (Source: David Iliff)

Thierry described a long stretch, roughly the ninth century to the early seventeenth, when Alsace was rich enough on wine money to help raise Strasbourg Cathedral, for a time the tallest building in the world, and to build the picture-postcard villages of Riquewihr and Ribeauvillé that tourists photograph today. Then came the Thirty Years' War, which gutted the vineyards, and two German annexations, in 1871 and 1940, that pulled the region back and forth across the border. Phylloxera, the vine-killing aphid that wrecked European vineyards in the late nineteenth century, finished the job the wars had started.

A different kind of French wine region: Inherited, not invented

If you look back into France’s history, you’ll realise that there is more than one way of becoming a wine region.

Some regions have spent the past two centuries smoothing themselves into a recognisable house style and selling it to the world, so that the name on the label is a promise of a certain taste. In the opposite camp are regions with sprawling, restless patchworks open to producer interpretation - where the family who made the bottle can tell you more than the regional name.

A boat filled with amphorae and barrels illustrates the intense traffic of merchandise and especially of wine on the Rhône river (Source: Musée Archéologique de Saint-Romain)

Alsace and the Côtes du Rhône sit in a third camp. They carry classic recognisable styles distinctive enough that an experienced drinker can often guess the region blind. Their styles also feel inherited from place, tradition and local habit much more than being engineered as brand consistency or left entirely to producer-by-producer interpretation. An Alsace Riesling, bone dry with a line of lemon and wet-stone minerality, does not taste like a Riesling from anywhere else. A Côtes du Rhône red blend, built around Grenache with its warm red fruit and pepper, announces its home valley within a sniff.

Thierry Fritsch of CIVA speaking during our interview.

Interestingly. the two regions’ winemaking practices are almost mirror images. Alsace built its reputation by bottling one grape at a time and letting the soil speak. The Côtes du Rhône largely built its by blending many grapes into something none of them could be alone.

When I asked Thierry what each region could learn from the other, he shared his admiration for Côtes du Rhône's "blending DNA" – the knack of marrying grapes into a single, consistent cuvée. But before diving into that, let’s have a high-level look at how each region became itself.

Alsace: the world's most versatile bench of wines

➤ Seven grapes, and how to read the bottle

Walk into a wine shop and pick up an Alsace bottle and you will notice something almost no other classic French region does: the grape variety is right there on the front, in big letters. Most French labels tell you the place, not the grape, and leave you to know that red Burgundy means Pinot Noir or that Sancerre means Sauvignon Blanc. Alsace, shaped by centuries of German influence, names the grape instead. That single habit makes it the easiest serious French region for a beginner to navigate. You do not need a map. You need to know only seven names.

Those seven are the main varieties of grape: Riesling, Pinot Gris, Gewurztraminer, Muscat, Pinot Blanc, Sylvaner and Pinot Noir. White wine is about 90 per cent of what Alsace makes, and Thierry's pitch, repeated several times in our interview, is that no other region on earth offers this full a range of white styles, from bone dry to lusciously sweet, from feather-light to rich and oily, still and sparkling. "Tell me what kind of wine you like, you will find it in Alsace," Thierry said to me, “What is but a very small region is able to offer you all that you expect." At the sweet end of the spectrum are the two late-harvest styles the region keeps for the end of a meal, Vendanges Tardives and the rarer Sélection de Grains Nobles, made from grapes left to ripen long and shrivel on the vine; Thierry noted they are less than one per cent of what Alsace makes, and a single glass can stand in for dessert.

Two more details mark an Alsace bottle out on the shelf. By law, the wine is sold in a tall, slim flûte that belongs to the region alone and it has to be bottled in Alsace itself, a requirement in place since 1972 that few other French regions share. Both are small and quaint ways the region keeps hold of its identity.

➤ Aromatic but dry, with a style for every mood

The one thing Thierry most wants drinkers to unlearn is the idea that Alsace is always sweet. The confusion is understandable. The grapes are so aromatic that the wines smell “sweet” even when they are simply fruity.

Thierry's distinction is between fruitiness and sugar: a Gewurztraminer can explode with lychee, mango and passion fruit and still be a dry wine; a Riesling can smell of lemon, grapefruit and white flowers, with a whiff of struck flint or, in older bottles, a distinctive tertiary note of petrol, and yet leave the mouth clean and taut. Decades ago, most Alsace wines did keep some sugar, because fermentation stopped early and left it behind – and that older impression has been slow to fade. Today, Thierry said, the wines have gone "drier and more concentrated towards the terroir." In a hot climate the dry style needs no defending: when the weather turns warm, most drinkers want something fresh and elegant rather than sweet, and that is part of the versatility Thierry keeps coming back to, a range with a wine for every mood and every table.

(Source: CIVA)

The CIVA charts these grapes from the lightest and most bracing to the richest. Sylvaner is the lean, faintly green everyday white. Pinot Blanc is soft and round, the easy one to reach for. Muscat is bone dry yet smells of fresh grapes and orange blossom. Riesling is the racy backbone, all lemon, lime and struck flint. Pinot Gris turns fuller and smoky, with honey, quince and a note of mushroom. Gewurztraminer is the showpiece, opulent and perfumed with lychee, rose and baking spice. Pinot Noir, the lone red, ranges from cherry-light to firmly structured. Freshness is the thread that runs through the lot.

➤ Why an Alsace Riesling should taste like no other; the Alsace ladder

When your region has only seven grape varieties, the concept of terroir is what sets one wine apart from the next. It is French shorthand for everything a place gives a wine: the soil, the slope, the angle of the sun, the local climate, even the customs of the people who farm it. Alsace has an almost absurd variety of terroir packed into a thin 120-kilometre ribbon. That ribbon runs along the eastern foot of the Vosges, from Marlenheim in the north down to Thann in the south, with Colmar, which styles itself the capital of Alsace wine, near its middle. The CIVA counts thirteen distinct geological formations, and they sort themselves roughly by height.

On the plain, alluvial soils make open and fruit-forward wines that show their grape clearly; up on the Vosges foothills, where most of the Grands Crus sit, limestone and marl give lemony, long-structured, sometimes peppery wines; and highest of all, at the mountain edge, the hardest old rock makes the most distinctive bottles, granite aromatic with fine acidity, schist lean and austere, and the rare volcanic soils smoky and briny. The most celebrated of those volcanic sites is the steep Rangen, at Thann on the region’s southern tip.

(Source: CIVA)

To capture that, the region built a quality ladder: ordinary AOC Alsace at the base, then wines from a single named village, then wines from a single named plot, a lieu-dit, and at the top 51 Grands Crus, individual hillside sites recognised as the best of the best. The first to be classified, back in 1975, was the Schlossberg; the smallest, the Kanzlerberg, covers barely three hectares.

Thierry emphasised the importance of appreciating terroir in Alsatian wines in our interview: When you buy a Grand Cru like Wineck-Schlossberg, the site behind the Jean-Marc Bernhard Riesling poured at the seminar, you are not buying another Riesling. You should know that you are buying from a place like no other: that lemony, upright Riesling finishes with a salty, mineral tang you could pin directly on the granite beneath the vines. Thierry insists that drinkers would enjoy their wines so much more when they realise an Alsace Riesling from a specific place is not interchangeable with any other.

The climate is the unsung hero. The Vosges mountains catch the rain coming off the Atlantic and leave the vineyards in a dry pocket, a rain shadow, with around 1,800 hours of sun a year at Colmar and some of the lowest rainfall in France. Warm days ripen the fruit; cool nights lock in acidity. That day-to-night swing, what growers call diurnal range, is what keeps the wines fresh and precise rather than blowsy, and it will matter a great deal later in this story.

Côtes du Rhône: granite north, and master blends in the sunlit south

➤ The Côtes du Rhône ladder, and the wider Rhône Valley map

The Côtes du Rhône is less a single ladder than a set of overlapping appellation systems. The Côtes du Rhône is the Rhône Valley’s largest appellation and one of the oldest too. Much of its framework was sealed in 1937, when Côtes du Rhône became one of the first wines in France to win AOC status, a milestone that Julie called the birth of the region's DNA.

(Source: Inter Rhône)

At the base of the Côtes du Rhône pyramid sits regional Côtes du Rhône wines, drawn from 172 communes across six departments and the largest single slice of the valley, about two-thirds of all Côtes du Rhône wine and roughly 45 per cent of total Rhône Valley production. Above it come Côtes du Rhône Villages, then Villages allowed to print their own name. Above and alongside it sit the crus, individual appellations whose names carry their own force. These include southern names such as Gigondas, Vacqueyras and Cairanne, but also the great northern appellations: Côte-Rôtie, Condrieu, Hermitage, Cornas, Saint-Joseph, Crozes-Hermitage, Saint-Péray and Château-Grillet.

The Côtes du Rhône is best understood as two regions, southern and northern, which could hardly feel more different.

➤ The sunlit south, where blending is the whole game

The broad southern stretch is Mediterranean, windier and far hotter, and here blending is the whole game. Julie was very emphatic about this in our interview. Blending is the one thing Côtes du Rhône will not give up.

The southern Rhône Valley village of Séguret (Source: Côtes du Rhône) 

"We are really master blenders," she said, partly by choice and partly by necessity. For centuries, the south has been handing growers a huge spread of grapes and soils, giving birth to the art of fitting them together for balance. The shorthand most drinkers learn first is GSM: Grenache for warmth, red fruit and alcohol; Syrah for colour, pepper and structure; Mourvèdre for dark fruit, grip and a savoury, almost meaty edge. But the regulations allow a startling number of others, more than thirty across the Rhône Valley's appellations. That blending instinct runs across the southern appellations, for instance, Gigondas is prized for Grenache-led depth and spice; Vacqueyras for generous, structured reds, Cairanne for a more lifted, elegant profile.

Julie Coutton-Siadou of Inter Rhône reminiscing the festivities of the region.

The blends of southern Rhône appellations resolve into two broad red styles the seminar laid out. One is fresh, fruity and round, made for early drinking and even a light chill: strawberry and raspberry, supple tannins, a year to three in the cellar. The other is darker and built to keep: blackberry, pepper, garrigue and liquorice, firmer tannins, three to ten years of life. Most of what Côtes du Rhône is doing now leans towards the first without giving up the second. The whites and the new-wave rosés get their turn later. Julie's advice to curious drinkers is to also explore the supporting cast of grape varieties in blends: Carignan, Cinsault, the whites Clairette, Bourboulenc and Viognier. She compared them to seasoning, the one per cent of salt or spice that changes a dish.

➤ The granite north, one grape at a time

The northern half is almost a different country. North of Montélimar the valley narrows to steep granite terraces that have to be worked by hand, the climate turns cooler and semi-continental, and the wines are usually built on a single grape rather than a blend.

Côte-Rôtie vineyards (Source: BlueBreezeWiki)

Syrah makes the reds, from the perfumed, peppery Côte-Rôtie to the darker power of Hermitage and Cornas. Viognier makes the whites, heady and floral, at Condrieu and the tiny Château-Grillet, while Saint-Péray turns Marsanne and Roussanne into both still and sparkling wine. The seminar's northern pour was a Crozes-Hermitage, the Labaya from a northern Rhône Valley benchmark producer Yves Cuilleron, a pure Syrah that is supple and round off its sandy soils, good young and better in five years. This is the northern Côtes du Rhône that works one grape and one slope at a time.

Two more natural features finish the picture for the entire Rhône Valley. 

Julie described the Mistral, a great dry and cooling wind that funnels down the valley, keeps the vineyards healthy and the grapes free of diseases, which is part of why organic farming is so feasible here. And garrigue, the wild Provençal scrub of thyme, rosemary and lavender, is the word tasters reach for to describe the herbal, sun-baked note in a southern appellation red.

So that is the inheritance of the two regions: Alsace, a highly versatile table of mostly white wines that labels by seven grapes and farms a mosaic of soils; and the Côtes du Rhône (for the most part), a red-wine blender that farms sun, wind and pebbles. For most of the last century, knowing that much was enough. Then both regions started rewriting their own rules.

Red wines in white Alsace; white and pink wines in red Côtes du Rhône

➤ Alsace puts the first red grape on its grandest hills

The most concrete sign that something has changed in Alsace is a rule change many drinkers have not heard about. The Grand Cru tier, the 51 top hillside sites, had been reserved for white grapes since it was created in the 1970s. In 2022 it admitted a red one. Pinot Noir is now authorised for Grand Cru in Hengst and Kirchberg de Barr, with Vorbourg added in 2024. For a region whose prestige was previously built on white wine, letting a red grape onto its grandest slopes is a major development and a statement about the region’s future.

Pinot Noir is still only about 13 per cent of what Alsace plants, but it is the fastest-rising part of the region, and the evolution of Alsatian Pinot Noir in the glass has been dramatic. Thierry remembers the Alsace Pinot Noir of the 1980s as tannic, heavy and over-oaked. The versions now, he said, can reach the level of a Premier Cru red Burgundy, and he named names without hesitation: Albert Mann, Domaine Paul Blanck, Marcel Deiss. Warming summers are part of the reason a grape that used to struggle to ripen this far north now makes serious red wine, which is a rare example of climate change handing a region a new tool rather than taking one away. The seminar poured a Gustave Lorentz Pinot Noir Réserve to make the point.

➤ A quiet pink revolution in Côtes du Rhône, and the whites coming back too

The Rhône Valley has been climbing out of its own box from the other direction. Its box is mostly red, and the surprise, Julie said, is the whites. They had been "forgotten," yet over the past twenty years nearly every cellar re-equipped with temperature control and stainless steel, the kit that lets a hot-country white keep its nerve, and the results changed her own pitch. Put a glass of white Côtes du Rhône in front of someone who only knows the reds, she said, and the usual reaction is surprise and delight at the round, fresh, food-friendly fruit.

Vineyards in Tavel, an acclaimed appellation in southern Rhône Valley celebrated for exclusively making dry, full-bodied rosé wines that captivated people for centuries, including the renowned novelist Honoré de Balzac (Source: Inter Rhône)

Then there is the rosé. Julie called it "a rosé revolution that’s quietly happening," and she clearly wishes it were louder. Over the past twenty years the pale, barely-there pink rosés of Provence became the global template. Côtes du Rhône and Rhône Valley’s rosés, especially those from the Tavel cru (one of the rare French appellations that exclusively make rosé), are fuller-bodied, naturally deep and structured. The region made a deliberate choice to double down on the style that it does best, betting that a bolder, more characterful pink was both a sharper point of difference and a truer version of itself. The new Côtes du Rhône pink is not the pale, whispering Provence style but something with greater fruit, spice and structure. The difference in profile is built in the cellar: a pale Provence rosé is pressed almost at once, so the juice barely takes colour, while Tavel lets the juice steep on the skins for up to two or three days, drawing out colour, aroma, spice and a little grip, closer to a light red than a blush and able to take a year or two of age. There are two categories: a pale, lively, fruity style built for the aperitif and drunk within the year, and a deeper, spicier, fuller-bodied style, the Tavel camp, with real structure and even a little cellaring potential.

➤ New fizz, and a map that keeps redrawing itself in Rhône Valley

There’ve also been other experiments in the cellars of Rhône Valley. One example is research into Grenache-based sparkling wine made as a Blanc de Noirs, a white fizz from a red grape, which Julie singled out as real "untapped potential". The valley is not starting from nothing here: it has made sparkling in the Diois for generations, so the Grenache project adds a new style on top of an old heritage.

Even the map is moving. The Côtes du Rhône has been promoting villages to full cru status at a steady clip: Beaumes de Venise in 2005, Vinsobres in 2006, Rasteau in 2010, Cairanne in 2016 and Laudun in 2024, taking the count from 13 crus at the turn of the century to 18 today. The movement is not only about minting new crus. Gigondas had its white wines recognised in 2023, and several villages that today make only red are pushing, as a group, to get their whites onto the map as well. A new cru is not merely a marketing badge. It is years of paperwork and tasting panels certifying that a patch of land reliably makes distinctive wine of a certain quality, so five new ones in twenty years is a real vote of confidence in the region's own hillsides.

The new generation rewriting the rules

None of this happens without people and new blood. Both regions are living through a historic handover.

➤ Home from harvests abroad, with the elders now listening

Julie and Thierry both described a similar pattern in their respective regions. A young Alsatian or Rhône Valley winemaker, often the latest in a family that has farmed the same slopes for generations, turns twenty and leaves, to study oenology and to work a harvest or two in Australia, Chile or California, where the rules more forgiving and the experiments wilder. They come home with new ideas. What is unusual is that the older generation is highly receptive now. Thierry's example from Alsace was the Pinot Noir turnaround: the grandfather could not make this kind of wine, the grandson travelled and learned how, and "the old generation accepts that." In a craft where elders normally teach juniors, here the juniors are also teaching up. At houses like Trimbach, Thierry noted, two or three generations now work side by side.

The Grand Cru Geisberg vineyard, located near the village of Ribeauvillé, produces the fruit for Maison Trimbach's greatest wines. (Source: Marylou Jean)

Some of the fascinating ideas the young bring back are potentially divisive. Thierry, a trained oenologist who likes his Alsace wines more "clean" and "precise," observed a small growing trend of natural and skin-macerated wines, the low-additive, sometimes cloudy styles that have swept wine bars from Tokyo to London. He has tasted both excellent ones and unusual ones, but reads it positively as the new generation playing at the edges to find a new expression of its wine.

In the Côtes du Rhône the handover is built on three kinds of producer that have learned to work together. Julie laid them out: independent estates that grow and bottle their own wine; cooperative cellars, where many small growers pool their grapes (a movement that took root here in the 1920s and 1930s when growers banded together for strength in numbers); and the négociant houses, merchants who buy grapes or wine to blend and sell. 

➤ Natural farming as a way of life

Similar values show up in how both regions farm. Julie put it plainly: the wine is made in the vineyard now, not in the cellar. The winery intervenes less, the real work has moved outdoors to the soil and the fruit, and the proof is in how the trade now talks about a hard year. A 'vigneron's vintage,' the kind where the weather offers no help, is often the best of all, she said, because it is the one where nothing can be masked once the grapes come in.

(Source: Inter Rhône)

Then there’s organic and biodynamic farming, where Alsace was one of France’s pioneers: it ran its first organic vineyard trials in 1961 and its first biodynamic ones in 1969 (biodynamics being the more esoteric cousin of organics, which follows a lunar calendar and treats the whole farm as a single living system), and today more than a third of the region is certified organic. Thierry reminds us that Alsatians have been doing this long before organic farming became part of marketing taglines. "For us in Alsace it's just a way of life," he said, contrasting growers elsewhere who convert only because importers demand it. In the Rhône Valley the shift is younger but moving fast, Julie said, pushed by exactly that returning generation: high-environmental-value certification now covers more than a third of the harvest by area, organic about a quarter, with a growing band moving towards regenerative farming that tries to rebuild soil.

A modern wine culture of lightness, freshness and festivity

All of this reinvention should excite the discerning modern drinker. Julie observed a clear evolution in drinking preferences: people increasingly reach for lighter, lower-alcohol wines, and both regions are well-poised to satisfy that preference, from picking earlier to positioning wines as chillable drinks.

➤ Picking earlier, blending for freshness

The first answer to modern consumption habits is to maximise freshness in wines. Inter Rhône frames this as a shift towards a supple, easy-drinking profile rather than an overt tannic power that requires decades in the cellar. In practice that means picking grapes earlier, often in the cool of the night so the fruit arrives crisp rather than baked, blending for acidity, and holding alcohol below the old 14-plus per cent that made big, bold southern reds. As Julie elaborated: a grape baked in the sun gives you jam and stewed fruit, the same grape picked at dawn gives you redcurrant and freshness. She also retired an old piece of wine-snob lore, the idea that a good bottle must be cellared for several decades before it is worth drinking. The modern Côtes du Rhône wine, she said, tastes good young and ages well too.

Alsace naturally arrives at the same place thanks to its cooler geography. Thierry describes a fifty-year shift towards drier wines with more depth, minerality and precision, and the region's whole white range, from a feather-light Sylvaner to a structured Grand Cru Riesling, already lives in the fresh, lower-alcohol register the market is drifting towards.

➤ Serve it cool, drink it at music festivals

The second answer is serving temperature, and it is the easiest one to appreciate if you live in a warmer climate. Inter Rhône has been running a campaign, "Stay fresh, chill the Côtes du Rhône way," urging drinkers to serve even the reds cool at around 14 degrees Celsius. Her own rule of thumb is even simpler, what Inter Rhône calls 20/20: take a white out of the fridge twenty minutes before serving so it has time to open up, and give a red twenty minutes in the fridge before pouring. Julie made the case with how she spends her own summers: at 30-plus degrees on a terrace, a red warms fast in the glass, the alcohol starts to show and the fruit flattens, so a light chill keeps the wine in balance and keeps you pouring.

The third answer is about occasion. Côtes du Rhône now regularly turns up at French music festivals through the summer. Inter Rhône has been making their wines available at festival bars to meet younger drinkers where they already are – right next to music, beer and soft drinks – with no need for a sommelier or guided tasting, Julie quipped.

Alsace's contribution to festivities is its sparkling wine that ranks only second to Champagne in brand prestige: Crémant d'Alsace. Made by the same bottle-fermented method as Champagne, it is now roughly 40 per cent of everything Alsace produces and the best-selling Crémant in France. 2026 marks 50 years since it won its own appellation. As an aperitif at a dinner, it does a great deal of Champagne's job at a friendlier price.

The bottle the seminar poured made a piece of Crémant d'Alsace history tangible: a Crémant Cuvée Julien from Maison Dopff au Moulin, the house credited with creating Crémant d'Alsace in the early twentieth century, after a Dopff brought the traditional method home from the Paris Universal Exhibition. The cuvée's name points back to Julien Dopff himself – the founding pioneer of Crémant d'Alsace.

➤ Worth the trip: routes, cellars and festivals

To fully understand Alsace and the Côtes du Rhône beyond just tasting its wines, you need to take a trip down, see the villages, meet the growers and join in the wine festivals. Visitors are welcomed with wide smiles, Thierry and Julie promised. Alsace runs one of the oldest wine routes in France, the Route des Vins, opened in 1953, which winds along the Vosges foothills past half-timbered villages such as Riquewihr and Ribeauvillé and draws around six million visitors a year.

Riquewihr and Ribeauvillé villages (Source: l'Office de Tourisme du Pays de Ribeauvillé et Riquewihr)

Producers sell roughly a quarter of wines straight from the cellar door during summertime, with the Christmas markets drawing the crowds back in winter. Thierry summed up the human warmth of the cool region with an anecdote: sommelier students would often spend their own holidays touring Alsace, because every grower opens the door, when in other regions, Thierry joked, you might ring the bell and nobody comes. 

Cairanne village in southern Rhône Valley is famous for its festivals (Source: Pauline Daniel)

 

In the Côtes du Rhône the same conviviality takes a more southern form and run all summer from May to September. Most villages hold a Fête du Vin across the summer, one of the most famous being Cairanne village which would mark its 51st Fête du Vin this year. Julie shared about how the valley still has fellowships dating back to the early 1900s who would celebrate together. One Côtes du Rhône anthem’s refrain opens with “À boir', à boir', à boire,” (Drink up, drink up, drink up), " En nos verres et nos coupes le vin de l'amitié" (Into our glasses and our cups the wine of friendship), before ending with “Que le Côtes du Rhône abreuve nos gosiers.” (May the Côtes du Rhône quench our throats). Julie hopes more would notice this side of the Côtes du Rhône: a slow, unhurried country between the Mediterranean and the Alps that is well worth the detour.

What to pour with Peking duck, sushi and chicken rice

Thierry, who has been visiting Asia for years, had several pairing suggestions that seem to come out of the mind of a culinary genius.

Peking duck with Pinot Gris: the wine's smoky richness and faint honey meeting the caramelised skin and sweet plum sauce. He fondly remembers this pairing meal he enjoyed with his late friend, the well-known Singaporean wine collector Dr NK Yong.

There are several different philosophies to wine and food pairing, but Thierry is most passionate about wine profiles that contrast with the dish: so acidity against fat excites him more than richness against richness.

You find this in sushi and sashimi with Alsace Riesling: the wine's sharp acidity cuts the fattiness of the fish and lifts the soy and wasabi. He would send oysters towards a steely Sylvaner or Riesling, and the lychee-and-spice perfume of Gewurztraminer towards the chilli heat of Thai or Malaysian food, a regional pairing he has tested many times.

Thierry fondly remembers enjoying wine and food pairings with the late Dr NK Yong, a prolific wine collector who also happens to be a renowned surgeon who pioneered the first open-heart surgery in Singapore.

Back home, Julie loves a good white wine with a cheese board, and pointed out that Rhône Valley whites do the job better than most people expect here. She also enjoys chilled reds with barbecue. Extending that idea to Asian food, Julie suggests pairing a chilled Côtes du Rhône red with salty, richer, soy sauce-based dishes such as Hainanese chicken rice.

Where to begin, and how cold to serve it

Asked where a newcomer should start, Julie's route in is to start approachable and then chase the edges of the blend, moving from the familiar Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre (GSM) to the Côtes du Rhône's more exotic grapes, a Carignan or a Cinsault, a Clairette or a Viognier, the seasoning that gives each wine its accent. And she had a gentle scolding for the way many of us treat wine as treasure. We hoard good bottles for an occasion that never quite arrives, she said, when sometimes it is the wine itself that makes the occasion. Stop waiting, advised Julie.

Coming to Alsace, Thierry said that “if you don’t know what to drink, enjoy a glass of Pinot Blanc” which he calls a "chameleon" for being very easy to like and hard to get wrong, the glass to reach for when you do not want to think. From there the label really helps with the navigating: Riesling for freshness, Pinot Gris for something rounder and richer, Gewurztraminer when you want perfume and a little flamboyance. His one firm instruction is about temperature. Serve Alsace wines cold, “enjoy it at around 8 degrees, do not hesitate to drink it too cold.” In our climate the wine will warm to its best in the glass within minutes.

Hotter summers, and two regions adapting fast

If there is one thing that genuinely keeps these winemakers up at night, both Thierry and Julie identified the climate.

➤ The Côtes du Rhône fights on two fronts, and the heat repays it a little

Julie framed the Côtes du Rhône's response as two jobs at once. One is adaptation, the vineyard and cellar work already described, the dawn picking and the acid-keeping and the cooler serving, all aimed at holding freshness as the summers heat up. The other is mitigation, the region trying to be part of the solution: regenerative farming, holding water in the soil and using less of it, keeping the ground alive, cutting carbon and waste. What she sees across the valley, she said, is younger winemakers treating these as the most important problems of their careers, and she expects that within twenty years the sustainable methods now seen as pioneering will simply be standard practice across the valley.

Vineyards near the southern Rhône Valley village of Sablet with the Dentelles de Montmirail in the background (Source: Jean-Louis Zimmermann)

There have been gains from warming. In the southern Rhône Valley a clutch of late-ripening grapes (Carignan and Cinsault among them, along with older southern varieties like Bourboulenc, Terret Noir and Piquepoul), were once hard to bring to full ripeness in the cooler decades. But the very heat that troubles others is what now ripens them, turning an old liability into more musical notes for great blends that the valley is chasing.

➤ Cool nights buying Alsace time, and its unfinished faire-savoir

On balance, the warming climate has also dealt some Alsace producers a better hand of cards than other regions. Its cool nights and Vosges rain shadow are a built-in brake on the worst of the heat, the very thing keeping its whites fresh while warmer regions struggle. And the same warming that threatens others is what finally ripened Alsatian Pinot Noir into serious red wine. Sixty years of organic and biodynamic farming have left its growers much better prepared than most for low-intervention, climate-resilient viticulture.

Thierry describes to me the practical measures that clever Alsatian growers will continue to implement over the next decade, such as closer vine spacing, and planting trees and hedges to slow the drying wind. And while my question was posed with a 10-year horizon in mind, Thierry and his Alsatian producers are already impatiently searching for solutions to manage the warming climate in the long horizon of 50 years ahead. They have no neat answers as of yet but it suffices to say that this important work is being led by the same travelled, impatient generation reshaping everything else.

Climate is not the only unfinished job. Thierry named a second issue that has nothing to do with the weather. Alsace already has the savoir-faire, he said, the know-how to make impressive wines. Yet Thierry hopes the region will develop greater faire-savoir, the ability to communicate and explain its wines to a modern audience, the storytelling that could turn its best wines into wines all people can understand and ask for by name.

Why now’s the best opportunity for a drinker in Côtes du Rhône and Alsace

So where does all this leave a curious drinker? In a very good spot.

Alsace even makes it easy: the grape is printed on the label, so you only need to learn a handful of names, and almost everything is a fresh, dry white that suits a hot evening. Côtes du Rhône is the land of the master blenders, where reds are built from several grapes for warmth and spice, and where even the reds taste good lightly chilled.

The wines we tasted from left to right: Domaine Yves Cuilleron Crozes-Hermitage Labaya; La Ferme du Mont Vacqueyras Le Rif; Vignerons Ardéchois Côtes du Rhône Montjau; Mas de Sainte Croix Côtes du Rhône Friandise Rosé; Gustav Lorentz Pinot Noir Reserve; Maurice Schoech Pinot Gris Sonnenberg Cuvée Justin; Jean-Marc Bernhard Riesling Grand Cru Wineck-Schlossberg; Dopff Au Moulin Crémant D'Alsace Brut Julien.

 

The two regions are also ready to present their reinventions to the world, choosing this moment to stretch what those styles can be: a red grape on Alsace's grandest white hillsides, a serious white and rosé revolution the Côtes du Rhône remains a little modest about, a sparkling Blanc de Noirs wine still in the lab, and a generation rewriting the family rules with the family's blessing. Both came through wars and disease to get here, and both are being shaken up by a young generation with their parents' blessing.

The most persuasive argument, as ever, is in the glass. And for the moment, bottles often cost less than the fame of these regions would suggest. As Julie said, you do not need a special occasion. Grab a bottle, serve it a little too cold, and be curious, Thierry recommends. That is most of the secret.

@CharsiuCharlie