Your intrepid liquor reporter has been taking full advantage of patio season, and will often be found whiling away the summer afternoons on a sunny deck with a cold beverage.
While I am out with some of my more classy drinking companions, our travels will sometimes take us to wine bars, and the hot weather demands a chilled glass of white wine.
Over the years, your humble narrator has consumed enough Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc to float a battleship, so I often seek out the hidden gems on the wine list, and I recently found a Gewürztraminer to die for.
For those not familiar with the varietal, Gewürztraminer is a unique white grape, that is thought to originate near the Italian city of Tramin, just a bit south of the Austrian border.
Over the centuries, the Gewürztraminer grape made its way to the Alsace wine region, which has passed back and forth between French and German territory several times.
As a high-alcohol and low-acidity grape, Gewürztraminer is almost the polar opposite of Riesling, the other premier white grape of the Alsace region.
It was in Alsace that Gewürztraminer finally found its spiritual home, with the cool climate and mineral-rich soils providing the optimal terroir for the Gewürztraminer grape to flourish.
For centuries, the grape was simply referred to as Traminer, named for the city of Tramin. However, the particular strain growing in Alsace was highly aromatic, and was quickly named Gewürztraminer, which our German-speaking readers will recognize as “Spicy Traminer” or “Perfumed Traminer”.
The Traminer grape mutates very easily, so there are hundreds of clones and offshoots, Gewürztraminer happening to be one of the most successful mutations.
So unique is the bouquet of the Gewürztraminer grape, that is it common for wine snobs like your humble narrator to show off to their friends by identifying the grape while blindfolded, simply by sniffing the glass.
Gewürztraminer has intense and complex aromatics, bursting with notes of lychee, sweet rose, and grapefruit.
On the tongue, there is more lychee, as well as tropical fruits like pineapple and apricot, and perhaps even a bit of honeyed cinnamon, followed by a spicy finish.
The strong aromatics and spicy finish make Gewürztraminer a fabulous companion to spicy curry dishes, or Mexican dishes containing chili peppers. While it may sound a bit lowbrow, I often enjoy Gewürztraminer with a plate of nachos heaped high with jalapeño peppers.
The Gewürztraminer grape is finicky in the vineyard, preferring cool climates like Alsace, Oregon, and even Canada. Yes, gentle reader, we produce our very own Gewürztraminer wines here in the Great White North.
The Okanagan Valley is at close to the same latitude as the Alsace region of France, which may explain why the Gewürztraminer does so well in Canada.
During my most recent annual pilgrimage to Kelowna for the fall harvest wine festival, I found more than a dozen local wineries growing Gewürztraminer, making it an established player in the Canadian wine industry.
My favourite was the Quails’ Gate Gewürztraminer, hailing from just outside of Kelowna. Faithful readers may recall your intrepid liquor reporter waxing poetic about different wines from this particular winery many times over the years, so this should come as no surprise.
An off-dry wine with a hint of sweetness, peaches and orange blossom danced on my tongue, with aromas of ginger and stone fruits on the nose. Made in the traditional Alsace style, there was plenty of spicy minerality in the body, a legacy of the granite and limestone that forged the Okanagan Valley during volcanic eruptions millions of years ago.
The Tinhorn Creek Gewürztraminer was the favourite of my drinking companions during a recent winery tour, and the $15 price point makes it easy on the pocketbook as well.
With notes of banana and dried mango on the tongue, the Tinhorn Creek Gewürztraminer smelled like the rosewater perfume of a 19th-century French noblewoman. Smooth and silky in the glass, this wine had just a hint of residual sweetness, which made it pair well with a fresh fruit salad and spicy lettuce wraps.
Its low acidity and sweet aromas make Gewürztraminer popular for off-dry and even sweet dessert wines, making the grape highly adaptable to different styles. Give that tired old Chardonnay a pass, and sample a Gewürztraminer on your visit to a sunny patio.
