Grand Vin Amédée 2022

The Mathiers came to Salgesch in 1387. Originally from Marseille, they migrated to Switzerland via Grenoble. The reason for this was poverty and the opportunity to earn money abroad as mercenaries. The Mathiers were recruited for military service in Valais and, after completing their duty, decided not to return to their homeland but to settle in Salgesch. They soon discovered that the area was ideal for winegrowing. And they realized that a good glass of wine was far more conducive to life than warfare. Albert Mathier - as the name suggests, the founder of Albert Mathier & Söhne AG - was born in 1891, the second of nine children. He married Monika in 1918. This marriage produced five children. When the global economy hit rock bottom, the family tried to defy the recession by plowing up fields and meadows and planting vines. With their winery, they laid the foundations for their own wine history and that of the red wine metropolis of Salgesch.

In search of the roots of viticulture, the current owner Amédée Mathier traveled to Georgia in 2008 to visit various wineries and private winegrowers who produced Qvevri wines. Although he didn't like everything - the natural fermentation in clay vessels is delicate and can cause mistakes - he was fascinated by this archaic way of making wine. He realized that these wines spoke a completely different language to the ones we are used to drinking. He decided to produce wines in the traditional Georgian style in future and imported eight original Qvevris from Georgia that same year. Since then, the company has been the first winery in Switzerland to produce grapes and wines in traditional Georgian qvevris (clay vessels), which were made in Georgia and transported from there to Switzerland. The Albert Mathier & Sons wine family is thus taking on a pioneering role in our country in the revival of the world's oldest, 8000-year-old winemaking method, which is protected by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

The Albert Mathier & Söhne winery is a small family business that is committed to the enjoyment of wine lovers and has literally won awards: year after year, the liquid flagships of the Albert Mathier & Söhne wine family can be found at the top of the rankings in national and international wine competitions. Medals, diplomas and certificates that prove what you experience when you drink them: Quality of the very highest order. This winery is bursting with dynamism! On the basis of secure and highly proven Valais values, real innovations thrive here.

It is up to the cellar master to compose a complex, finesse-rich but balanced taste experience from wines of different characters. Often, colourful, full-bodied and tannic wines are blended with lighter, fruit-intensive wines to achieve a more complex, intense harmony of aromas. The aim is not to conceal the weaknesses of a wine, but to combine strengths; the cuvée should be of higher quality and taste better than the single-varietal wine. In order for a cuvée to present itself as a harmonious composition, characteristics such as fruitiness, acidity, tannin content, alcohol content and residual sweetness have to be very precisely sensory assessed during preliminary tastings. It is an art that requires a great deal of knowledge, skill, sensitivity and experience to finely match complementary varieties to create a particularly round and harmonious wine.

The terms assemblage and cuvée sometimes cause more confusion than clarity. This is because they are used differently in French than in German. In German-speaking countries, the term cuvée and the synonym assemblage are used for a blend of different grape varieties, vintages or sites. Not so in France. Cuvée comes from the French Cuve (vat or wine container) and actually refers to a certain amount of wine in a vessel. Accordingly, in French, each separately bottled wine is called a cuvée - in the sense of bottling. The composition of the cuvée is called assemblage in France. If simple wines are blended, the French speak of a coupage.