Domaine Marc Tempé, Haut Rhin

T he wines [Tempé’s] are unusually concentrated and individualistic, often with well-integrated residual sweetness and supremely textural, yet they have much energy and drive.
        —Anne Krebiehl, MW, Vinous Media, April 2024

This [AmZelle] full-bodied, balanced Riesling is refined and elegant on the palate and develops an intense, salty finish with finely tart citrus notes, which is carried by delicate tannins. From here it is not very far to his complex Grands Crus from the Schoenenbourg and the Mambourg, which are among the great dry Rieslings in the world.
        —Stephen Reinhardt, Frankfurter Allgemeine, August 2022

Marc Tempé farms his vineyards biodynamically, ferments with indigenous yeasts in either cask or foudre and ages everything a minimum of twenty-four months in his cold cellars prior to bottling, making these quite old school wines of impressive precision and mineral signature. All of his wines are beautiful.
        —John Gilman, View from the Cellar, July-August 2021

Of all our growers, Marc Tempé is the most idiosyncratic. The man marches to no drummer but his own, and he does so with blissful confidence devoid of arrogance. He doesn’t care what you or I think, and he doesn’t care about money; he cares about making really good, pure wine that really reflects its little piece of ground. Powerfully built (he’s called The Bear by at least one little boy in Colmar), hard working, he is also indefatigably upbeat, a quality that has shone steadfastly from the first day I met him in 1997.

He started his journey as a lab technician for the INAO, the body that governs France’s appellation system. He then stepped outdoors to become a vineyard expert for the same body, responsible for selecting lieux-dits (place names or single-vineyards) for possible inclusion into Alsace’s new grand cru system. In 1993 he started Domaine Marc Tempé with his wife Anne-Marie, from parcels inherited from both of their families. They immediately began the conversion to biodynamic farming, and 1995 became their first commercial release. In 1999, Léonard Humbrecht, the patriarch of Domaine Zind-Humbrecht, called Marc his “spiritual godson” in La Revue du Vin (note, with all due respect to Z-H, that Marc’s wines don’t tend to carry the same price tag).

Today the domaine comprises nearly 20 acres in the Haut Rhin radiating from the village of Zellenberg. The vines are pruned severely for low yields, harvested by hand, and pressed very slowly and carefully in order to retain acid and keep the pH as low as possible (the length of the pressing is determined by the type of grapes and their maturity, rather than by the simple calculus of weight + time = formulaic result). The grapes are never chaptalized; the must is never acidified; and laboratory yeast is never introduced. The wines are made either in old foudres (huge casks) or older Burgundy barrels (mostly obtained from Domaine Laflaive, a fellow biodynamic grower, and their use is dictated by the varietals— Pinot Gris, for example, does well in these smaller vessels—or by the small size of a given parcel). Fermentations take place at a very slow rate in two old, humid cellars he uses in Zellenberg, and the wines rest on their lees for a minimum of 24 months. This is something that no business plan would sanction but which, Marc is convinced, serves to emphasize a wine’s minerality and terroir. At bottling there is no fining and only a deft use of sulfur. Some wines, particularly the lieux-dits and grand crus, are bottled without filtration.

These are later harvest wines that are richly nuanced and complex, filled with unctuous orchard fruits, and flat-out delicious.  If you like hedonistic wines with an intellectual bent, Tempé would be your man.

FYI, as of 2022 according to Alsace’s syndicate the CIVA, of the 4,000-odd grape growers in Alsace, 48% are members of co-ops and 35% sell wine in bulk, leaving independent wineries at only 17%.

A video of Marc Tempé and the ’21 harvest is here