Spice Wine

By John Winthrop Haeger
photograph by Christopher Hirsheimer Source: Saveur

Gewurztraminer is the black sheep and the prodigal child of Alsatian wine. Nearly everyone who tastes it either adores it or detests it. Nearly everyone who makes it semi-secretly prefers some other grape. It is macho, flamboyant, baroque, exuberant, often delicious, sometimes stunning, and always distinctive. The trademark varietal in one of France’s greatest gastronomic regions—almost all the world’s production, except for trickles in Germany, Italy, eastern Europe, and North America, is concentrated in Alsace, between the Vosges Mountains and the Rhine—it is as bad a companion to most food as artichokes are to most wine. One of seven principal white-wine grape varieties permitted in Alsace (the sole red variety is pinot noir), gewurztraminer covers about seven thousand acres of land in the area—accounting for roughly one-fifth of the total vineyards planted and filling almost a half of the region’s top-quality grand cru vineyards. Gewurztraminer is the pink-skinned, musqué (literally, “musked”) mutation of traminer, a varietal thought to have originated near Termeno (or Tramin) in Italy’s Alto Adige region around the end of the first millennium. (Wonderfully round and aromatic wines, sometimes labeled termeno, are still made from “plain” traminer in various parts of northern Italy; under the name savignin, traminer is also grown in France’s Jura region, where it produces the sherrylike vin jaune.) It seems possible that gewurztraminer vines were first imported into Alsace from the Pfalz, just west of the Rhine, as early as the 16th century, but given the fuzziness that surrounds the history of grape varieties before the 19th century, it’s also quite possible that traminer and gewurztraminer coexisted without much distinction until rather recent times. According to Francis Burn, whose family has been vignerons in the elegant walled town of Gueberschwihr for three centuries, southern Alsace was the cradle for gewurztraminer, while riesling prevailed farther north. There is no consensus about the best sites for the grape today, but the Vosges Mountains are indeed higher at the southern end of the appellation, creating a drier microclimate and healthier conditions for late-ripening varietals like gewurztraminer. The grape’s rosy, russet-hued berries yield deeply colored yellow-gold wines that display a broad palette of intense aromas and flavors. Among the scents that tasters commonly identify in gewurztraminer are those of rose, peony, violet, geranium, banana, mango, citrus, litchi, acacia, verbena, vanilla, gingerbread, clove, cinnamon, and allspice. (In cooler vintage years, rose and verbena seem to dominate, while warmer vintages tend to favor tropical fruit and spice.) There are two main types of gewurztraminer in Alsace, “classic” and late-harvest, and two official quality categories, Alsace A.O.C., which may come from any portion of the appellation, and Alsace Grand Cru A.O.C., which must be made from grapes grown in one of 50 designated vineyards, mostly in the foothills of the Vosges, whose reputation for excellence has been well documented. As in Burgundy, grands crus are held to higher standards (that is, lower yield and higher sugar) than other vineyards are. Alsace also recognizes an unofficial tier of sites that are named but are not entitled to grand cru status. Grand cru gewurztraminers are usually bigger, richer, fatter, and better than their simple A.O.C. counterparts—but they’re not necessarily superior to some of these unofficially designated vineyards. Léonard Humbrecht, the garrulous vigneron whose Zind Humbrecht wines receive top ranking from critics, is a famously vocal proponent of the grand cru system in Alsace—but he is also proprietor of a number of designated vineyards, among them Windsbuhl, Hauserer (at Wintzenheim), and Herrenweg, which yield gewurztraminers absolutely as good as most grands crus. Late-harvest gewurztraminer—either vendange tardive or the unambiguously sweet sélection de grains nobles, which is usually affected by “noble rot”, or botrytis—is opulent, fragrant wine. Almost everybody ranks gewurztraminers like these among the finest dessert wines made anywhere; the best examples have more than once received perfect 100-point scores from the ratings mavens. It’s the other gewurztraminers, which account for more than 90 percent of the total produced, that inspire mixed feelings and present winemakers with real challenges. Jean-Michel Deiss, of Domaine Marcel Deiss, believes that making a good classic gewurztraminer is a matter of “giving some class” to a prolific varietal with a natural tendency to bitterness and, as he puts it, “violent notes of geranium”. Catherine Faller, who runs Domaine Weinbach with her mother, Colette, and sister, Laurence, uses a feminine metaphor: “You have to corset the exuberance of gewurztraminer,” she says. The problem is that the aromatic profile of gewurztraminer derives from compounds called terpenes, which are concentrated in the skins of the grapes. Terpenes underlie the powerful smell of things like turpentine, citronella, and geranium, and without them, gewurztraminer would smell a lot more like other white wine. The high residual sugar in late-harvest gewurztraminer masks terpenes quite effectively, but a decent expression of the compounds is essential to the “typical” character of the classic versions. Unfortunately, the distance from character to caricature can be distressingly short. Gewurztraminer has little flavor of any kind until it is very ripe; at Domaine Albert Mann, for instance, winemaker Maurice Barthelmé likes to see the skins “get fragile” before he picks—but at that level of ripeness, it’s easy for the terpenes to run away with the wine, especially with grapes grown in upland vineyards, in low-yielding, rocky, porous soil. When planted in the vigorous soil of Alsace’s lesser vineyards, the vines can produce a heavy crop of tasteless berries with barely a hint of varietal character and not enough terpene to make a geranium blush. Very slow pressing of whole berries to minimize extraction from the skins, cold settling before fermentation, and low-temperature fermentations with resident yeasts all seem to help keep terpenes in check. But almost without exception, winemakers rely on residual sugar, too. “You need it to cover the bitterness,” explains Catherine Faller. Just how much you need is a matter of debate. The 1998 Albert Mann Steingrubler Grand Cru clocks in at a swashbuckling 54 grams per liter of residual sugar—more than enough to qualify it as a late-harvest wine; Zind Humbrecht’s 1997 Clos Windsbuhl is bone dry by comparison at just four grams per liter, essentially imperceptible in the presence of the wine’s high acidity. Winemakers who produce gewurztraminer in the United States sometimes argue that terpenes are not an inevitable by-product of full ripeness but instead are a function of sunlight on the grape skins. Ted Bennett, of Navarro Vineyards, who has made gewurztraminer for 26 years in California’s Anderson Valley, thinks that partial sunlight stimulates the fullest terpene development. Fritz Meier, winemaker for Husch Vineyards, also in the Anderson Valley, argues that a winegrower can get all the terpenes his heart desires without awaiting superripe fruit, just by judicious leaf pulling (which exposes the grapes more fully to the sun). Its intense aromas, strong flavors, relatively high alcohol, and residual sugar combine to make gewurztraminer a difficult wine to pair with food. Even Alsatian restaurants with strong regional wine lists tend to downplay it; the celebrated three-star Auberge de l’Ill in Illhaeusern, for instance, includes only a dozen gewurztraminers on its list of more than 500 wines. Even the vintners who produce great examples of the wine seem to accept its inherent limitations. Christian Bas of the topflight Kuentz-Bas contrasts riesling (“which achieves completeness only when it is married with cuisine”) with gewurztraminer, which is “quite good by itself”. Maurice Barthelmé calls gewurztraminer “a winter afternoon fireside wine”. Sommeliers usually suggest the wine with highly seasoned dishes, especially those of Mexican or Asian origin, and some connoisseurs—like Catherine Faller—think it goes brilliantly with venison or wild boar, especially when cooked with fruit. Nearly everyone agrees that gewurztraminer is great with strong cheeses like munster and époisses. But is it possible to construct a multicourse meal entirely around it? “Of course,” says Serge Dubs, sommelier at the Auberge de l’Ill, “but only to make a point, the same way you can do with port.” The top producers of gewurztraminer in Alsace today seem to have differing opinions on its future. Francis Burn, whose Goldert Grand Cru wines win awards often and who calls gewurztraminer his “desert island wine”, is stubbornly optimistic. “The gewurztraminer customer used to be an aging grandmother,” he observes, “but now it is a man in his 40s. Men drink less dry now.” Jean-Michel Deiss, on the other hand, thinks the grape is being used incorrectly. Most gewurztraminer in Alsace, he explains, used to end up in field blends with riesling, sylvaner, muscat, and chasselas. In this context, the grape’s aromatic properties were an asset. After World War I, when Alsace reverted from German to French control, local vintners sought to upgrade their wines by replanting vineyards and abandoning field blends in favor of varietal bottling. But as they replanted gewurztraminer, Deiss continues, they propagated the most aromatic clones available—thus the “monster” wines some people can’t stand. “The future of gewurztraminer,” says Deiss unambiguously, “is that we return to traminer.” Or, alternatively, to field-blend wines. “Put the harmony of the landscape back in the bottle,” says Deiss passionately. “We have been dealing with caricature. Let’s allow terroir to play its unifying role.” (To prove his point, Deiss now makes two astonishing field-blend wines, Burg Gentil and Altenberg Grand Vin de Bergheim.) Marc Tempé, who makes stunning gewurztraminers from the Mambourg vineyard in Sigolsheim, says he is not sure about the advisability of field blends in Alsace. Léonard Humbrecht, for his part, thinks that the challenge is to exploit more of the hillside sites that produced great wine in earlier times and yank vineyards out of the plains. “Heavy wines from heavy, flat soils worked fine with fat-rich food,” he says, “but today we need new wines marked with finesse.” Sadly, Alsace has become known in recent years mostly for its cheaper wines, from overproductive vineyards—which is at least partly why the region was the object of withering criticism last year from the prestigious Revue du Vin de France, which skewered Alsace for its high yields (the highest of any appellation in France) and weak regulatory authorities and for a dilution of quality incompatible with the standards for fine white wine. Perhaps gewurztraminers from the best producers can help restore Alsace’s tarnished image. As Maurice Barthelmé, who is surely one of the aforementioned good producers, says, “In Alsace, we can make the best aromatic wines in the world. There is really no competition.” John Winthrop Haeger, a writer based in Northern California, covered the wines of Vouvray for our September/October 1999 issue.

This article was first published in Saveur in Issue #47