The Alfavin story
For over 40 years the Moesle family has shared their passion for wine with you. From the start our mission has been to invite you to discover the most talented winemakers. Can you imagine that at the end of the 1970s when we started to travel the famous wine regions there were well under 100 producers that were really commited to quality: Some Grand Cru Classes from Bordeaux, a few Burgundy, Rhone, Champagne and Alsace vignerons in France. A handful in Germany, some in the Piedmont and Tuscany, Vega Sicilia and also some Napa Valley cabernets. Wine was not in fashion and you could buy the most famous wines without a problem. You need a case of Romanee-Conti? No problem, no need to buy la Tache or Echezeaux with it. Petrus and Lafleur were easily available. There were even stocks of Mouton Rothschild 1945, Chateau Margaux 1900 or Lafite from the 1870s left in Bordeaux. It was almost impossible to find a wine over 20 euro, which adjusted for inflation corresponds to 100 euro today.
Our fist sale in 1982 was a case of Lafite 1978 but Matthias started working with famous Domaines in Burgundy: Leroy, Leflaive, Vogue, Lignier, Mugnier, Sauzet, Angerville, Rousseau made good wines, but Burgundy deservedly had a bad reputation for irregular, dilute, unripe wines which we had to overcome. A good 10 years later there was a surge of interest in wine in many areas in the world. Robert Parkers ratings enabled those with little knowledge of wine to chose the best wines and an "champions league" of producers was established whose wines went for increasingly higher prices.
The positive effect was that the standards of winemaking improved widely as high ratings were increasingly a success factor for wineries. The downside was that both vineyard and cellar practice led to very concentrated, extracted wines that received generous oak microoxidation to be fruity and attractive even young. Let us be honest, when a young wine is tasted and rated the more open and accessible wines will win, whereas the firm wines with little aromatic developments are very hard to assess on an individual tasting. To really assess a wine, one needs to follow it during its development as only the winemaker himself can realistically do. With an excessive tasting schedule Robert Parker suffered from a certain palate fatigue and one can follow the trend of 100 point wines becoming more and more powerful and concentrated.
We clearly mentioned these problems early on and stopped buying Bordeaux in the late 1990s. We had never followed the excesses in the Rhone, Australia and Napa and warned early against an international style that led to wines being less expressive of their terroir and traditional winemaking styles of their region. In the new millenium public taste began to turn against such wines, even if Bordeaux winemakers only recently (after 2010) started to look for more balance in their wines.
One issue that is surprisingly often overlooked in the wineworld is climate change. Winemakers used to train the vines for maximum sun exposure. Two decades later, many years have such high summer temperatures that it is a challenge to achieve ripeness of tannins in the grape skins before natural sugar levels become excessively high, and acidity too low. Winemaking has adapted quickly to maintain balance and to avoid overripe aromas. At the moment the worry is no longer the wet, cold year but the excessively hot year, but more years then ever having good conditions. However, the future is uncertain. Especially areas known for elegant or cool, mineral driven wines like e.g. Burgundy, Chablis and Champagne, might lose their specific character and get richer, but also less complex and balanced. Under the more pessimistic scenarios things will get so bad that syrah will for example take over from pinot noir in Burgundy.
With the establishment o an internationally recognised elite of winemakers, it did not take long for wine being discovered as an investment vehicle. After 1995 more and more wine funds were set up and investors started buying wines for investment. This led to an unprecendented price hike. While the vast majority of wineries had not greatly increased their prices it was possible to sell their wines with enormous profit and mark ups well of a few thousand percent were possible in some cases. Out of respect of the hard work of the winery we have never ever marked up wines of close to 100 %. This created the other problem that speculators bought up our wines to sell them at huge profit. We started to give more room to the talented young neighbours of the famous producers who produce similar quality at a fraction of the price. Is it possible to find burgundies as good as Domaine de la Romanee Conti for a fraction of the price? Yes!!
Champagne is a relatively new focus for us, as the region has not priced its top wines as excessively as other regions, allthough there are some worrying trends in recent years, with an international champagne boom. A fact that is often overlooked though, is that quality champagne improves immensely from aging. Alfavin has responded to this buy building up a reserve of over 10000 bottles. Every year we put up some of these reserve vintages for sale, so that you can discover mature champagnes. We strategically buy large quantities of excellent vintages like 2008 that we store in a 800 meter long tunnel that was carved into the rock. We take every possible measure that the older bottles you buy from us have optimum freshness.
Even if merchants avoid the subject, Bordeaux prices are beginning to fall, so we think, that the time is right to buy Bordeaux again, which will be a focus of our new offerings.
We believe in individual service which does not come for free and thus cannot live with supermarket mark ups. However we will never compromise our values for the sake of profit: Our most important value is quality, followed by honesty and fairness. Our mission is to unite wine lovers, to build a bridge between winemakers and drinkers, to further communication over wine, and enhance the social aspect of wine as a companion of human sociability and even friendship. The aim for the future is to organize more tastings.
Alfavin digs deep in a few regions that we know really well, rather than cover a lot of regions but remain shallow and offer the latest media darlings. Everything about Alfavin reflects what we believe in. Every bottle you find on these pages is here for one reason: We love it.
I am Anastasia Moesle, welcome to Alfavin.
