Follow us on Instagram where we post every day.
NOW – The Summer Salons – three salons, spanning a three day weekend 17-19th July.
Alsace has become the new Loire, well, at least for this July. The bottleneck of salons is really a result of the opportunities of scheduling these three established wine-fairs, coming out from the waves of CoVid confinements.
On the calendar is the 7th edition of the Salon des Vins Libres. This is a biannual fair which started in 2008, under the energy and solidarity of the “gang of four” and their partners/families – Christian Binner, Jean-Pierre Frick, Patrick Meyer and Bruno Schueller. This is the cornerstone natural wine fair held in Alsace, with a cast of French winemakers and representation from Italy, Spain and Georgia. There is serious discussion going on to turn Salon des Vins Libres into an annual event.
The third edition of d’Summer Fascht takes place on the Sunday and Monday of the weekend. This is also (currently) a bi-annual fair. As the group of natural wine makers in Alsace has grown, so has the capacity to organise a major fair focused on Alsace natural wine. The seeds (grape pips) of this fair started with “offs” tagged onto the Salon des Vins Libres salons from 2016. In late 2019 the Association des Vins Libres d’Alsace (AVLA) was set up to promote the wines of its members, which number 40+ at the last count. AVLA now organise d’Summer Fascht fairs. We had the utmost pleasure in running an AVLA table at WineCallSF in San Francisco, in November 2019. This was AVLA’s first international event (chuffed to be involved).
The third fair on this busy (and hopefully sunny) weekend is VertigVineux, which I belief is in its third, annual edition. Set up by a group of winemakers around Ostheim, including La Grange de l’Oncle Charles and Clé de Sol, the salon has 27 winemakers from all over France. The ambiance here is definitely in the neo-autonomists approach to winemaking and country life.
With the natural wine scene in Alsace practically bursting at the scenes, it is no surprise to see multiple initiatives that are not all falling under the same central group. A sign of energy and opportunity.
Lots more information on the organisation of the salons at –
Instagram for Salons des Vins Libres
Web site Salon des Vins Libres web
Instagram for d’Summer Fascht
VertigVineux is somewhere in the dark corridors of facebook VertigVineux
And here are the posters – if you want a clean, jpeg version of any of these for your kitchen wall, fermentation room, bar, etc – email us at [email protected]
