Complantation is the entry to the Marcel Deiss range, yet it is anything but simple wine - there's the whole spectrum of 13 different grape varieties in the mix here, including all sorts of obscurities like Pinot Beurot & Chasselas Rose (just for the grape train spotters). It smells like an orchard, there's no other way to describe it. Honey, blossoms, peach, nectarine, a whole fruit salad, turned into liquid wine form. Clean, crisp, but ripe and juicy, it packs a big mouthful of powerful, fragrant, chunky flavour too. What a wine.

Marcel Deiss is one of Alsace's hero producers, with the current custodian of this storied estate, Jean-Michel Deiss, a bit of a vineyard evangelist. What makes Jean-Michel's family estate important is the unwavering attention to grapes, not the winery, with the 27 hectares of vineyards managed biodynamically since before it was cool way back in 2003. The family way also involves what's known as 'complantation' where a whole smorgasbord of different grape varieties are co-planted within the vineyard and picked together. You might know this method as a 'field blend', although for Marcel Deiss, it's just how the family makes wine. With 13 different grapes in the vineyard, the wines are always blends, and usually with no grape varieties on the label - just an expression of site and purpose. If this all sounds a bit out there, rest assured that these aren't wild drinks - the textural white wines and spicy light reds from Marcel Deiss are, instead, just wonderfully evocative and interesting mouthfuls of flavour with a real sense of how the best Alsace wines of ancient times might have tasted.