Les Vins Pirouettes

Les Vins Pirouettes is a wine community created by Christian Binner, who enjoys great respect in natural wine circles, which offers young Alsatian winegrowers the opportunity to produce and bottle their own initial wines instead of selling their grapes to larger cooperatives. Binner brings his 20 years of experience in natural winemaking to the community, and creates unique wines together with selected organic and biodynamic growers. Each cuvée is its own individual, produced on the farmer's own farm and named after that farmer. Binner also comes with a new kind of marketing thinking and already existing distribution channels. In running the project, Binner is assisted by oenologists Pierre Sanchez and Xavier Couturier and Vanessa Letort, who is responsible for marketing.

Known as an accomplished winemaker, Binner has experience to draw from, as the Binner family has farmed and made wine for generations in Ammerschwihr, southern Alsace, a short drive from the city of Colmar. The estate owns several Grand Cru parcels, including the Schlossberg hill and the nearby Wineck Schlossberg and Kaefferkopf. Binner credits his own success to his father, for whom organic farming, manual harvesting and the use of wild yeasts have long been natural methods. However, filtering wines and adding sulfites was once customary. In 1998, the farm welcomed Marcel Lapierre, the pioneer of natural wines, whose philosophy and cellar methods inspired Binner to give up extra measures in his own winemaking and switch to the production of natural wines.

Binner relies on biodynamic principles in the cultivation of orchards, and in 2012 he built a new winery from local light wood and stone, which, according to the energetic winemaker, exudes a harmonious energy that conforms to Steiner's anthroposophy. Along with his own wine production, Binner shares his know-how with the Les Vins Pirouettes community. In Binner's opinion, winemaking should be spontaneous and experimental as well as creative and personal. The name Pirouettes comes from the nature of the project. According to Binner, the wine blends produced together are "like fine pirouettes - beautiful artistic patterns that are created as a result of certain skills".

https://www.lesvinspirouettes.com/