All together now.

If you've never encountered the wines of Domaine Marcel Deiss, you needn't be embarrassed. The family makes a tiny amount of wine (no more than 10,000 cases annually) from more than 200 separate parcels in a handful of premier cru and and grand cru vineyards, most within a few kilometers of the fortified medieval village of Bergheim, in Alsace, the place they call home. More than two-thirds of what they make never leaves the Hexagon, which leaves damn little for those of us outside France.  

You're most likely to discover a Deiss wine at a restaurant where the presence of one or two is enough to tip you off that someone is taking the wine list very seriously indeed -- and isn't afraid to step off the the well-worn path in pursuit of something extraordinary.

The scantily bearded young man above left is Mathieu Deiss (rhymes with nice) who was in town last week making the rounds of selected retailers and restaurateurs explaining exactly what makes his family's wines unique. The 26 year-old enologist-engineer recently assumed the winemaking duties from father Jean-Michel Deiss - a man, by all accounts, at least as brilliantly idiosyncratic as his wines.

The family markets some varietal wines using the region's traditional cultivars (riesling, pinot gris, muscat, gewurztraminer, and pinot blanc) but their top wines are all 'field blends,' meaning wine made from some or all of these varietals, planted together in a single vineyard, then harvested, pressed, and fermented en masse. 

Complantation, as it's called in French, is traditional in Alsace, but it's been largely abandoned during the last fifty years in favor of the one vineyard-one varietal model. 

Since the wines are all spectacularly delicious, showing a finesse, balance, and a kind of chromatic richness that can only be wondered 
at, you may assume that field blending was undertaken with just this end in mind -- but it's  more complicated than that.   

Chez Deiss, complantation is a means of demonstrating the power of certain exceptionally talented vineyards to shape the character of the wine produced from them, regardless of what varietals are in play. In this schema, riesling and pinot gris (for example) are little more than the stationery upon which messages in the language of Englegarten, Grasberg, Mambourg, etc. are imprinted.  It's the message that matters, not the paper.

The priority given to star-quality vineyards at the expense of grape varieties is clearly evident in the design of the domaine's labels -  as that of grand cru Schoenenbourg (above right, varietal constituents unspecified) illustrates.

Of course, to be able to play this game you have to own or rent parcels in powerfully expressive vineyards. It doesn't work with any old piece of ground.

Mathieu makes no more than a few hundred cases each of his premier cru and grand cru wines each year. You would think the competition for the luscious trickle that finds its way to  Massachusetts would be sharp and the price correspondingly high. But these wines continue to fly under the radar. Premiers crus typically retail for between $45 and $55 per bottle, grands crus for around $100.  Both can often be purchased for less - but even if they couldn't, they would still be strong contenders for most undervalued great wine in the world. 

Domaine Marcel Deiss is imported by VINTUS Wines, Pleasantville, N.Y.(914-769-3000 x202) and distributed in Massachusetts by Martignetti Companies (617-680-3437).