Bruno Schueller: Can't We Try To Work Less Well?

Perhaps the least controversial thing to be said about the polarizing work of influential Haut-Rhin vigneron Bruno Schueller is that a tasting of his wines reveals more about the tasters than the wines. Few natural winemakers in Alsace or beyond work with such a vast imaginative scope when it comes to determining what constitutes organoleptic harmony in a wine. A taster of Schueller’s wines is either willing to acknowledge that harmony can coexist, or even depend upon, many attributes arbitrarily dismissed as flaws within conventional wine education - or not.

Schueller assumed responsibility for his family’s then-5ha Husseren-lès-Châteaux estate in 1982 at age seventeen, and worked alongside his father Gérard until the latter’s passing in 2022. Gérard Schueller had never embraced synthetic chemical agriculture; together, father and son gradually eliminated even the use of manure as fertilizer, accepting significantly lower yields in pursuit of maturity and concentration. Today Schueller sprays organic treatments far less than most peers; fully a third of the now over 10ha estate receives no copper or sulfur treatments whatsoever in a given year. The estate’s unsulfited and unfiltered wines1 sit nowadays at the pinnacle of renown in the world of natural wine2, known for, among other things, the unusual practice of oxidative fermentation and aging in un-topped-up barrels and tanks.

I first visited Schueller in 2019, in the context of research for the The World of Natural Wine. I won’t be the first to profess it was an unforgettable experience, permanently altering my perspective on winemaking. I’ve returned to his cellar on several occasions since then, and each time time I seem leave with a new and surprising insight to chew on for the next few months (or years). The interview below is drawn from my last visit in May 2024; in it, he elucidates, in characteristically unpretentious terms, a compelling argument for moderation in vineyard treatments. His suggestion to “work [vineyards] less well,” contains echos, conscious or not, of Masanobu Fukuoka’s “do-nothing” philosophy of farming.

Aaron

The following interview was conducted on May 15th, 2024. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.

To what extent have you enlarged the estate since taking over from your father?

BRUNO SCHUELLER: Yes. My parents vineyards were 5ha. Today it’s over 10ha. There are more than 4ha that are rented.

What would you consider a good yield in a normal year?

A good yield is having enough wine to be able to vinify peacefully without having [undue stress]. I’d need 35,000 bottles so that we can run the estate. With that we can pay all the staff, etc. But then there are years like 2021, where we made 3500 bottles.

So about 32HL/ha? That’s quite low, compared to neighbors in organics.

Yes, yes. But the objective is to be able to continue - that’s all. Sometimes it happens that we do [bigger] yields. In 2023, we’re at more than 40hl/ha. That makes practically 10,000 bottles of margin. But we sell about 35,000 bottles, and with that, the estate works.

I’ve always said that the important thing in the vineyards is you need to recover the energy you put into it.