From Steven Graf:

We met Theo the night after a huge party in Dambach, where we were celebrating the 500 year anniversary of Beck-Hartweg. We were slightly tired and our stomach was making strange noises. While we parked, I promised the car that we would not be picking up any new producers today, and asked that they would be polite and try to taste through the wines as if they hadn't spent all night pillaging a 500 year old cellar a few miles away. As is often the case, I was wrong. 

Theo, it turned out, was in the midst of a crisis of his own. He'd met and fallen in love with a fancy sommelier in Strausberg who was won over by Theo's charm, but not so much his wines. Theo, like us, had come up in the natural wine scene, and had painstakingly been trying to make glou glou from Alsace. He named cuvées with puns of Jura varieties, dogmatically macerated everything, and had a lot of success in doing so.   

But a new voice in his ear had him question a lot of the reasons behind his work in the vineyard and the cellar. In 2023, Theo decided to do things differently. He was going to make wines like his grandparents had before him. He was going to focus on the unique terroirs of the region, and try to render them as truthfully and as transparently as possible. The macerations we shortened, co-planted vineyards were the basis of new cuvées, and even the labels got an update with a nod to his grandparents.