Alison 2024 - Katla Wines

Originally from the suburbs of Mönchengladbach in the industrial Rhineland, it took leaving Germany for Jas to find her way into wine. Following her nose and picking her mentors well, Jas is now settled in Wöllstein in Rheinhessen, where she runs her micro-négoce, as well as keeping just under a hectare of vines herself. Working and studying wine at restaurants around Europe, Jas' swansong in service came at Dill in Reykjavík, the first restaurant in Iceland to win a Michelin star, where she worked as a sommelier. What followed was a series of stages with producers whose wines she loved, most notably a now-retired doyen of southern Ardèche wine, Gilles Azzoni, who incidentally introduced me to Jas' wines while I myself was staging at Gilles' cellar in les Salelles. It was Gilles who impressed on Jas the possibility of producing wines without a family estate or owning vines (Gilles, himself a Parisian, did it in 1980). Inspired and encouraged, Jas took what savings she had to rent a corner of a cellar in the Mosel, and source fruit from the disparate band of growers behind the region's burgeoning viticultural enlightenment.
Her first vintage was 2019, with 2,500 litres produced. It was a case of the right place at the right time for Jas. As a micro-négoce, she collaborates with growers at the epicentre of contemporary German winemaking from her base in Rheinhessen, working with varieties well-adapted to the pressures of the modern vineyard and a shifting climate. Sourcing grapes from Nahe, Pfalz, Rheinhessen and beyond, Jas applies the same subversive spirit in making her blends, deliberate in her crossing of borders, varieties, and colours, critiquing the hegemony of single-sites or noble varieties.

The Pinot Noir for this wine was sourced from Lukas Krauss' vineyards in Pfalz. Pfalz runs south along the eastern flank of the Haardt Mountains, themselves an extension of the Alsatian Vosges, protecting the region from rain and blessing the region with long, dry summers, helping Pinot to reach phenolic ripeness with enviable reliability. Lukas is in low-lying Lambsheim, where the mixture of loess and clay imbues the variety with the distinctive telluric timbre we find here, a testament to Lukas' work in the vines. Jas leans into the natural strengths of her raw materials here, with a long maceration (by her standards) extracting the density of the fruit, and the ageing in old wood bringing roundness and balance. A wine of sous-bois grace.

Grapes: Pinot Noir

Region: Lambsheim, Pfalz, Germany