Dear friends of the estate,
This year ending was a vintage of faces, voices, shared moments. Rich, especially, in meetings.
We had the pleasure of welcoming you for our traditional Open Doors, this suspended time when the courtyard of the estate starts to rustle with conversations, glasses that hang, reunions in the middle of drums and bottles. Then, in June, the estate experienced a first: the festival of music. Under a lingering light, the notes flew above the ranks, as another way to make the hill talk. A different way to live the place, to share it with you.
S A summer to wait for the rain, to look up at the sky, to watch the grapes ripen slowly, to watch each cloud as a promise. A summer to wait also for the arrival of a child, to feel my belly take its place, day after day. The days followed the rhythm of the plots and passages in the rows, while in parallel there was another chronology, more intimate. Between the cellar, the vineyards and the house, everything continued as always, but with, in the background, this still silent life that gave another color to the simplest gestures.
The harvest arrived early, started under an implacable sun and finished in the rain. A thousand contrasts, permanent adjustments, decisions to be taken quickly, but without haste. In the middle of this « chaos » There is apparent evidence that the 14th generation was born. On September 4, Hippolyte Camille Auguste Braun-Antigny arrived as a trait of the future at the heart of the season, as a new chapter in the history of the estate. By bearing the name of Camille, my grandfather, he sends a discreet wink to his great grandfather, to this line of winemakers who shaped this landscape and these wines before us.
Gradually, the vats calmed down, the wines found their place, and it was at home that the year continued. In France, Belgium, over the course of the end-of-year deliveries where, often, the delivery of a carton becomes an exchange, sometimes the beginning of a tasting on a corner table, a story of vintage. We also have the chance to work with professionals who carry our bottles and our history further: in Paris, Bordeaux, Switzerland, England. So many ways to leave Orschwihr to join you, glass in hand.
Thank you all for this new year together: for your loyalty, your returns, your passages to the estate, your words slided on an order form or at the detour of a salon. It is you who give a face to these wines.
Thanks also to our team, without which none of this would stand:
Anne-Claire, Jérémy, Éric, Vivien, Maxime – each one of us, in his own way, helps us to cross these vintages that follow each other without looking like each other, to hold the wire between the seasons, the rows of vines and the bottles that go home.
Finally, thanks to our faithful harvesters, for their tenacity, their presence under the heat and in the rain, their good morning mood and patient attention to every cluster that enters the cellar.
At the threshold of the end of the year, we wish you very nice parties, made of shared tables, nice conversations and, if the heart tells you, some glasses of our wines.
Next year,
with the same desire to welcome you here, on our hillsides, and to continue writing this story with you.
Annabelle Braun, with the complicity of Chantal, Christophe & Quentin.