What is the Cost of Bargain Natural Wine?
What is the Cost of Bargain Natural Wine?
The ubiquity of Pépin and Les Vins Pirouettes, two Alsace natural wine agencies linked to the DUO enology laboratory, is causing a stir in the region. How do they do it? And is it a good thing?
If you’ve been to a natural wine establishment over the past few years, it’s likely you’ve encountered bottles from two prominent Alsace natural wine négociant agencies, Les Vins Pirouettes and Pépin, both linked to influential Ostheim enology consultancy DUO Oenologie.
DUO founders Pierre Sanchez and Xavier Couturier own Les Vins Pirouettes outright1, while they possess shares of Pépin - and as DUO Oenologie they effectively produce both companies’ wines as contractors, advising suppliers on vinification and assemblage. Founded by Domaine Achillée’s Pierre Dietrich in 2021, Pépin does more-or-less overtly what Les Vins Pirouettes has been doing more quietly for a decade: deploying DUO Oenologie’s expertise in service of scaling-up natural négociant wine.
“My goal is for natural wine to be present at a maximum of places and for everyone to have access,” says Pierre Dietrich. “If it can bring together the maximum number of vignerons who work well, whether it’s little structures or medium-sized, who share the same ideas and the same values, well, let’s go for it.”
In 2023, as the wider slowdown in global wine sales began to really pinch within natural wine circles, Les Vins Pirouettes produced 1350HL, according to Couturier. Pépin produced 1200HL under its own name that year, in addition to an unspecified amount of wine released under proprietary labels for supermarkets, importers, and private institutions.2
“Pépin is a superb cash machine with a strong aggression on the market of small wine shops, even as it was initially aimed at supermarkets,” notes Dorlisheim vigneron Christophe Lindenlaub. “This could put certain vignerons in difficulty. It’s a taboo subject, because their suppliers are often my friends.”
Taken together, are Dietrich, Couturier, and Sanchez’s substantial négociant efforts democratizing natural wine, making it affordable to ever more consumers in France and beyond? Or are they, as a number of vignerons and wine merchants suggest, exploiting the natural wine inexperience of winegrowers and consumers alike in efforts to capture an ever greater share of the natural wine market, at the expense of the very natural vignerons responsible for creating it?
Subscribers can access new interviews with Pépin’s Pierre Dietrich, Xavier Couturier of DUO Oenologie, Strasbourg natural wine caviste Jean Walch of Au Fil du Vin Libre, and Ammerschwihr natural vigneron Christian Binner, plus a new profile of Les Jardins En-Chantant.
THE POWER OF A LAB
That both Les Vins Pirouettes and Pépin have come, in a few short years, to attain near ubiquity within the hotly contested natural wine market without attracting outright criticism from French natural winemakers is testament to the goodwill and respect enjoyed by DUO Oenologie.
A partnership founded in 2008 between enologists Pierre Sanchez and Xavier Couturier, DUO was arguably the first professional enology lab to specialize in working within the context of natural winemaking. The partners’ expertise and influence have grown in tandem with that of their early clients, who included Patrick Meyer, Jean-Pierre Frick, Christin Binner, and Jean-Pierre Rietsch. Today DUO counts among its clientele practically the entirety of the Alsace natural wine community, plus over sixty other estates spread throughout other regions.
“Compared to a vigneron, who does one harvest per year, I do sixty harvests, because I have sixty clients,” says Xavier Couturier. “You necessarily enrich your experience much faster, and you see what works and what doesn’t work. That’s the power of a lab like ours.”
The lab’s central role among the region’s natural winemakers has also made the partners’ expansion from enological counsel into natural wine production (in all but name) and sales almost frictionless.
“I think it’s good that the main négociants of natural wine in Alsace are owned by people who are active and make natural wines,” says Les Vins Pirouettes co-founder and Ammerschwihr vigneron Christian Binner, who sold his shares of the négociant company to Couturier and Sanchez in 2023, after concluding he himself had neither the will nor the bandwidth to expand Les Vins Pirouettes at the rate the market (and his partners) appeared to be demanding.
“I think it would be more dangerous if someone who makes traditional wine one day says, ‘Ooh, there’s a market to take, I will make natural wine.’ This could be more difficult to manage.”
SCARY AND SCARIER
Despite sharing the central involvement of DUO Oenologie - whose influence is perceptible in both négociant agencies’ wine styles - Les Vins Pirouettes and Pépin operate in different ways.
“Pépin is scarier than Pirouettes,” summarizes Herrlisheim vigneron-négociant Gabriel Willem of Les Jardins En-Chantant, “But Pirouettes is scary, too.” (Like most Alsace natural vignerons, Willem is, nonetheless, a client of DUO Oenologie for wine analyses. He appreciates his enologist and they play music together sometimes.)
For Les Vins Pirouettes, DUO Oenologie helps participating organic estates to produce natural wines, which are estate-bottled, then marketed and sold by Les Vins Pirouettes in bottles that include the vigneron’s name.
Pépin is an altogether different concept, one that might, from a certain light, seem designed to raise suspicion. The company’s wines expressly do not include information on vintage, grape variety3, region, terroir, or the identity of the winegrower, in favor of a radically streamlined approach of numbered lots of just four primary cuvées: one white, one red, one orange, and one petnat. Four branded cuvées whose contents change entirely according to the lot number. The only constant is a certain Pépin house style: whites are intended to be “dry and mineral,” according to Pierre Dietrich, while southern French reds generally contain a signature addition of muscat.
“For the majority of people who are drinking wine on a terrace, they’re saturated [with information] already,” says Dietrich. “If you start telling them the vintage, the vigneron, the terroir, and all that, they’re saturated completely.”
Dietrich explains that each lot of Pépin wines is bottled at a given organic grower’s estate, and that the principle of the production is each wine should contain the production of just one vigneron. He allows there are exceptions to this rule, when the company enacts blends from within its grower portfolio to save a troublesome tank of wine (in instances of elevated volatility, for example), or when adding unfinished must to finished wines for the production of petnat. He goes on to describe the adjustment of the extraction level of orange wines with the addition of white wines. One leaves with the impression that blends are somewhat common at the company.
It is an impression furthered by Pépin’s occasional recourse to purchasing tanks of organic wine from caves cooperatives. While Dietrich states that no purchases were made from caves cooperatives in 2024 - a consequence of the market slowdown - he leaves the door open to future purchases.
“On the condition that the growers work in organics since a long time, not from just the last hour, and people work well, the yields are respected, and we can vinify at the cooperative,” he says.
A BIG ASK
For natural wine consumers, Pépin’s proposition asks for a lot of trust. That the organic tanks Pépin has purchased from the Cave du Roi Dagobert and others was not sulfited at the harvest, was not yeasted, and did not see the addition of yeast nutrients, clarification agents, and so forth, as is all common practice at caves cooperative throughout France. That the purchases the company makes in Spain and Italy adhere to the same production ethics.
“They are publicly a bit of a mystery on the terroir and product source front,” says Alsace-based wine writer, events organizer, and hobbyist vigneron David Neilson of Back in Alsace.
On purely notional level, any natural wine “start-up” aiming to scale-up natural wine production in sufficient quantities to supply supermarkets and budget hotel chains will invariably come to resemble, in size and behavior and investment requirements, any other large corporation. Will Pépin succeed in becoming the first large corporation in history to prioritize natural wine production ethics like manual harvesting, additive-free vinification, non-sulfitage, and non-filtration over the fiscal demands of its payroll and its investors?
“Come see. That’s what we tell people,” says Dietrich. “Come see the people with whom we work. Look at the vines, look at the cellar. People say we sell cheaply, and it’s not true. We sell more expensively than half the natural vignerons. It’s just that we have a concept, and the concept works.”
THE CONCEPT
Pépin’s entry-level wines wholesale in France for between 7-8€, with discounts offered for large purchases, a price that places them on the lower end for unsulfited unfiltered natural wines with competent label art. (Pépin’s are signed by renowned wine artist Michel Tolmer.) It’s indeed true that many debuting natural and natural-adjacent winemakers in Alsace - particularly those who enjoy access to family estates that maintain a production of conventional wine - offer certain wines priced slightly lower.
“I’ve spoken with natural vignerons in Alsace, who say, ‘I don’t get angry with Pépin. I’m angry with the independent wine retailers who bought Pépin,’” says Xavier Couturier, in reference to Pépin’s notoriously simple concept. “‘Because it means they didn’t defend me,’ they say. ‘They preferred simplicity. And the worst part is my wines are a euro cheaper than Pépin. But they still buy Pépin’s wine.’”
This could be a testament to the genius of Dietrich’s radically pared-down approach to natural wine marketing. It could also be a testament to Pépin’s marketing and sales team, which by the standards of the natural wine world is very active and heavily staffed. (I’m told the company engages the services of no less than fourteen commercial agents.) This approach - which Dietrich calls “fighting with the same weapons” as conventional wine distributors - has itself engendered distrust among peers in Alsace.
“I’m afraid it will become like Kronenbourg or Meteor,” says Rosheim vigneron Yannick Meckert, for whom resisting Pépin’s business model has become something of a personal crusade. “At some point, it’ll be by the glass everywhere, and they’ll say, ‘If you keep our wine by the glass, we’ll pay for the renovation of the dining room, or we’ll do enormous reductions.’ There’s no morality, it’s nihilism. Alsace winegrowers don’t see what’s coming to them.”
A VIGNOBLE TO SAVE
No two French wine regions are quite alike, when it comes to the composition of land ownership. Alsace is particular in that vineyard land is very expensive - 150’000-180’000€ / hectare around Husserens-lès-Châteaux, for example - thanks to a reputation for productivity and the proximity of large client bases in Strasbourg and across borders to the north and the east. As a result, vineyards are usually passed down within families; upstart estates from those without family vineyards are few and far between.
“Even for farmland for market gardening, it’s around 70’000€ / ha,” notes Les Jardins En-Chantant’s Gabriel Willem, one of the region’s rare upstarts. “So it remains economically impossible to start a project. There basically aren’t any people who start projects without being a winegrower or farmer already.”
In an overcapitalized agricultural landscape where even organic estates are increasingly reliant on consultant winemakers, agents, and marketers to remain solvent, the work that Les Vins Pirouettes and Pépin do in accompanying heretofore floundering organic winegrowers to the natural wine market can look slightly less like an unreservedly virtuous act, and more like the paid preservation of a system of overly agglomerated land ownership.
“The approach is very shortsighted,” says Strasbourg natural wine retailer Jean Walch of Au Fil du Vin Libre. “What bothers me is how DUO Oenologie deem that they’re saving the vignoble of Alsace with what they’re doing.”
Depending on how you look at it, the fast growth of Pépin - and to a far lesser extent, Les Vins Pirouettes - represents either a Trojan horse aiding natural wine to penetrate new markets, or a Trojan horse aiding large organic estates with no fealty to the ethics of natural wine to penetrate natural wine markets, all while ceding greater portions of profit to enologists, investors, and marketers.
A GAMBLE
Everyone interviewed for this piece agreed that Les Vins Pirouettes and Pépin pay better rates to winegrowers than the region’s existing conventional négociants. The question, for many, is how long that situation can last.
“The problem when a market grows quickly is the consequence that the price goes down,” says Binner. “Because when the business is big, the importer says, “Oh, if you want, I can buy more, but you have to come down on the price.” And because the winegrowers produce more, you are in the middle of that and you say, ‘Ah, what do I do?’”
If Pépin, in particular, is able to offer simple natural wines at competitive prices while adequately paying growers and enological consultancy fees and the salaries and commissions of a substantial sales staff, it is thanks to the company’s unabashed appetite for investment. (Much of the backlash to the company among natural vignerons is traceable to one notorious 2023 appearance by Pierre Dietrich on a French television program called BFM Business; he has also solicited investment on a popular French finance podcast.)
The bottles of enjoyable, quaffable, non-vintage-dated Pépin on wine shop shelves worldwide are well-priced; whether it is the real price is open to debate. It is a situation that recalls the dawn of Uber and other ride-share and food delivery apps, when delirious levels of investment made using and working for these services quite appealing, until such a time as they had captured sufficient market share to risk raising prices on riders and paying drivers less.
“At some point, no matter the realm, there’s always someone who pays at the end,” says Jean Walch, who says he denies customer requests for Pépin twice a week. “The money that people invent in such a way doesn't exist. At the end of the accounting, there’s a cost. Either a social cost, or an environmental cost, but necessarily someone will pay when it’s all added up.”
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Consider the preceding report to be an overture for ISSUE 11: ALSATIAN INSPIRATION.
Previously I have endeavored to accumulate enough material to release regional NOT DRINKING POISON issues all at once in one big deluge, but nowadays for the sake of expediency and my own sanity I think it’ll be better to parcel things out into two or three installments. (Blame new parenthood, among other distractions.)
PART ONE of ALSATIAN INSPIRATION contains:
An interview with PIERRE DIETRICH of DOMAINE ACHILLEE and PEPIN, on his AMBITIONS to DEMOCRATIZE NATURAL WINE.
An interview with enologist XAVIER COUTURIER of DUO OENOLOGIE, LES VINS PIROUETTES, and PEPIN, on what it’s like working at the NERVE CENTER of ALSATIAN NATURAL WINE.
An interview with outspoken and eloquent STRASBOURG natural wine retailer JEAN WALCH of AU FIL DU VIN LIBRE.
A profile of radical and idealist neo-vignerons and market gardeners GABRIEL AND LEA WILLEM of LES JARDINS EN-CHANTANT in HERRLISHEIM-PRES-COLMAR.
A new PODCAST with pionneering AMMWERSCHWIHR natural vigneron CHRISTIAN BINNER. Listen here.
Look out in the coming week or two for Part II, and perhaps even a Part III a little further down the line. It’s not like I’ll get tired of visiting Alsace. My sauerkraut threshold is enormous. This past spring I also discovered the existence, in Alsace, of delightful boudins blancs (small white sausages) embedded with cubes of munster. I’ve been searching for them on return visits ever since.
Anyway. I hope I’ve managed to divert your attention, if only momentarily, from the terrifying US election. Stay warm, everyone! A glass of macerated sylvaner might do the trick.
From 2014 - 2023 it was a collaboration with Ammerschwihr natural vigneron Christian Binner.
Pépin founder Pierre Dietrich estimates that wines produced by Pépin under proprietary labels amount to only 2% of total production, a figure somewhat difficult to square with his simultaneous assertion that supermarkets insist on ordering products that do not go out of stock, and the presence of Pépin-produced wines in France’s Biocoop chain, which maintains 700 locations throughout the nation.
Pépin-branded red wines sourced from outside of Alsace are not bottled in Alsace bottles and do, contrary to the rest of production, state grape varieties, to avoid confusion with the company’s Alsace reds, which are necessarily pinot noir.