Alizée & Thibault Tassin

In the far south of Champagne, where the hills roll gently through the Côte des Bar, Thibault Tassin is quietly reshaping what the region can be.
He grew up surrounded by vines — generations of his family have been growing grapes in Celles-sur-Ource for decades — but instead of simply continuing the story, he decided to rewrite it.

When Thibault and his partner Alizée began working their own tiny parcel of land, they made a deliberate choice: to work differently. To slow down. To let the vineyard speak before the winemaker does.

Lukas Hammelmann

In the quiet, open fields of Zeiskam in the southern Pfalz, Lukas Hammelmann is showing how much character can rise from a landscape long dismissed as too flat, too easy, too ordinary. This isn’t postcard wine country — and that’s exactly what makes his work so compelling. He’s not trying to borrow prestige. He’s building his own.

Rather than leaving for the “famous” slopes, he chose to trust the soils beneath his feet — loess for finesse, limestone for tension, sandstone for momentum, and old terraces that carry depth and memory. His parcels are small and intentional, organically farmed, and worked with the belief that honesty isn’t a marketing line — it’s something you earn, season after season, in the vineyard.

Winery Andres

In the northern Pfalz, where the vineyards of Deidesheim catch the day’s first and last light, Weingut Andres has quietly forged its own direction. When brothers Thomas and Michael Andres took over the family estate in 2015, their goal wasn’t noise but clarity — a clearer purpose, a clearer sense of origin, and wines that speak in full sentences rather than headlines.

Their vines sit on a layered mix of weathered sandstone, limestone, and marl, soils that naturally lend both brightness and calm. The work in the vineyard is organic, deliberate, and unhurried — the kind of approach where precision is earned through repetition, not through ego. Long before anything reaches the cellar, the decisions are already made among the rows: what to keep, what to sacrifice, how to hold freshness without chasing it.