Jean-Marc Dreyer: If You Wait, the Trees Come

If you’re like me - a wine lover first and foremost, who came only later to accept the necessity of understanding viticulture - then you have probably nodded through your fair share of mystifying, unremarkable vineyard visits with vignerons, waiting to taste wine.

The work of Rosheim vigneron Jean-Marc Dreyer has been pivotal for me, because it marked a reversal in the usual order of things. I fell in love with his wines and it was their peculiar qualities that made me very keen to learn more about his viticultural practice. In addition to being consistently nourishing, complex, and digeste, Dreyer’s macerated whites, in particular, are highly resistant to oxidation; like many wines by Husseren-lès-Châteaux maestro Bruno Schueller, they seem able to transform and evolve, rather than fall off, when bottles are opened and left unattended for weeks or months. Dreyer’s wines generally evince the hallmarks of long fermentation (complexity, integrated volatility), which itself often bespeaks a minimalist approach to soil work (and the concomitant lower nitrogen levels in wine musts).

Lo, when I found the opportunity to return chez Dreyer for a vineyard tour in May 2024, the peculiarities of his beyond-organic farming practices confirmed and indeed exceeded much of what I had anticipated. Most parcels have seen no soil work whatsoever in many years. The last time Dreyer employed fertilizer was 1998. Most unusually, Dreyer allows trees to grow within his vineyards, nowadays preferring spontaneous tree growth to the intentional cultivation of trees within parcels (a practice he has also experimented with over many years). Thoughtful, stammering, prone to self-correction nine times within a single phrase, Dreyer is nothing if not modest about his viticultural investigations. He insists, almost in spite of himself, that he has yet to reach firm conclusions about the economic viability maintaining trees within vineyards.

Aaron

The following interview was conducted on May 11th, 2024. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How did you come to embrace non-plowing? It’s a rare position to take among organic vignerons in Alsace and beyond.

JEAN-MARC DREYER: I was lucky, because my father didn’t work the soils much, and herbicided rarely, or not at all. At the time, there was water, and we were dealing with living soils. Because earlier, the soils were simpler.