Joseph Cattin

The family is not from there. François Cattin left Porrentruy, in Switzerland, settled in Voegtlinshoffen and turned to wine in 1720. Around 1850 Antoine Cattin committed the house fully to the vine. The twelfth generation runs it today.

The name on the label is Joseph Cattin, who lived from 1882 to 1963. He was a pioneer of grafting during the phylloxera crisis, which is how European viticulture was saved: the aphid killed the European vine at the root and the only way out was to graft it onto resistant American rootstock. Locally he was known as the king of muscat.

Voegtlinshoffen lies some five kilometres south of Colmar and has eighty-seven hectares under vine. A quarter of that is classified Grand Cru Hatschbourg, which the village shares with neighbouring Hattstadt.

There are documentary references to that site from 1188: it had been giving wine for more than five hundred years by the time the Cattins arrived from Switzerland.