Winegrowers’ Portraits Pfaffenheim
Cave des Vignerons de Pfaffenheim
Quality, tradition and innovation
Located at some fifteen kilometres southwest of Colmar, the village of Pfaffenheim leans against the foothills of the Vosges and has one of the largest vineyards of Alsace. Created by a few local wine growers who decided to mobilize their resources in order to work more efficiently, the Cave des Vignerons de Pfaffenheim bottled for the first time in 1959.
Now it gathers more than 180 members who produce 2.5 million bottles yearly and control 250 hectares of vines in several hamlets around the village.
The history of Alsace is marked with the appellations and monovarietals. The Cave mainly produces the classical varieties that have built the fame of the region, but it does not fear to get off the beaten track by creating a large range of multi-varietal wines, audacious and exhilarating, with evocative names like
Black Tie or
Tête-à-Tête. It also crafts a fruity red wine matured in oak barrels stemming from Pinot Noir with a suggestive name:
La Griffe du Diable [The Devil’s Claw].
le village de Pfaffenheim.
The Cave des Vignerons de Pfaffenheim has a peculiar feature, a major guideline to assure the quality of the wines it makes: it only works with wine growers who guarantee hand picking which enables a very selective sorting of the grapes. They also have to respect precise specifications in conducting vineyard in order to get the best suitable grapes for the design of the organoleptic profiles of the produced wines.
The Cave’s oenologists have at their disposal an ultra-modern tool that allows a great flexibility in the organisation of the vinifications and the ageing of the wines. They thus can operate a selection as from the arrival of the harvest, according to the intrinsic qualities of the grapes and the gustative profiles wanted for the wines and the markets.
The
Cave des Vignerons de Pfaffenheim is now considered as one of the quality leaders of the Alsace wines. Several times awarded at the
Concours Général Agricole de Paris, it is also rewarded every year in more than 40 international contests. Its wines are served on the greatest tables of the world and remain indisputably some of the most representative of the Alsatian vineyard.
In 1997, the Cave takes over the House Dopff & Irion and Château de Riquewihr located in the eponymous village, a particularly active and flourishing city as from the Middle Ages thanks to the fame of its wines that were exported to whole Northern Europe, the nearby Rhine being the main thoroughfare of the time.
The Dopff and Irion families, who can be retraced in the vineyard back the 16th century, knew how to foster their inheritance over generations. So the visitors can discover, under the castle built in 1549 by the Princes of Wurtenberg, a unique cellar where are jealously guarded some old tuns (one of them, beautifully crafted, dates back 1783) and a 19th-century screw press.
In 1945, René Dopff, close friend of André Malraux who he fought with within the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade during the Liberation of France and especially of Alsace, takes over the destiny of Dopff & Irion. He restructures his vineyard of Château de Riquewihr into five estates to whom he gives names sounding typically French:
Les Murailles [The Bulwarks] (Riesling),
Les Sorcières [The Witches] (Gewurztraminer),
Les Maquisards [The Resistance Fighters] (Pinot Gris),
Les Amandiers [The Almond Trees] (Muscat),
Les Tonnelles [The Arbours] (Pinot Noir). Besides, more than the third of the total surface area of these domains is classed Grand Cru, of which the famous Schœnenbourg.
René Dopff then goes to conquer the Great Tables, in France and abroad. He provides the Elysée Palace, Buckingham Palace or the liner France for its inauguration. The House Dopff & Irion produces wines that are now known all over the world and gets every years many awards, including the IWSC title of Best Producer of French Wine, in London in 2002.
Today, the vineyard manager and the oenologists perpetuate the House Dopff & Irion’s know-how and tradition to offer the French and foreign customers the pleasure to enjoy great Alsace wines.Marie-Caroline Bourrellis
Cave des Vignerons de Pfaffenheim
5, rue du Chai
68250 Pfaffenheim - France
Tél. : +33 (0) 3 89 78 08 08www.pfaffenheim.com
